"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Resourcefulness
One of the agents here posted something on Ecovative Design and their new biodegradable, organic foam. To take something as noxious and needlessly longlasting as styrofoam and replacing it with mushroom mycelium is really awesome!
One of the things that really saddened me when I went to Thailand was seeing all the partially broken down styrofoam stuck in the mangrove forests and the trash fires people would have right next to or even UNDER THEIR HOUSES to dispose of all the useless scraps of plastic lying around.
When I went to Mississippi the smoke from the incinerators would blacken the bayous... streets and fences were littered with strips of plastic for months after Katrina. Some barren, torn down trees looked like they'd been flocked for Christmas.
Peru was no better. At the headwaters of the Amazon, the Madre de Dios river thousands of miles from the Atlantic, there were huge fetid ma**** of plastic and styrofoam crap right downstream from the villages of Laberinto and Puerto Maldonado.
Even sacred sites like Machu Picchu and El Pueblo de los Muertos in Chachapoyas had been littered upon and vandalized.
The saddest part was the biggest offenders were not tourists (though they were a huge source of the problem), the worst were the local children. Often, their parents had no history with these new chemical products, and they treated them as though they were the rinds of fruit they were so used to (and often replacing). They usually were just trying to be like the well-to-do people they saw on TV or heard on the radio...
So when organizations like Ecovative come along and at least partially replace the need for these persistent contaminants like styrofoam, it makes me so happy I almost want to cry...
I just hope the waste streams (husks and straw) they're diverting aren't depriving some other system (pigs?mulch?) of nutrients.
One of the things that really saddened me when I went to Thailand was seeing all the partially broken down styrofoam stuck in the mangrove forests and the trash fires people would have right next to or even UNDER THEIR HOUSES to dispose of all the useless scraps of plastic lying around.
When I went to Mississippi the smoke from the incinerators would blacken the bayous... streets and fences were littered with strips of plastic for months after Katrina. Some barren, torn down trees looked like they'd been flocked for Christmas.
Peru was no better. At the headwaters of the Amazon, the Madre de Dios river thousands of miles from the Atlantic, there were huge fetid ma**** of plastic and styrofoam crap right downstream from the villages of Laberinto and Puerto Maldonado.
Even sacred sites like Machu Picchu and El Pueblo de los Muertos in Chachapoyas had been littered upon and vandalized.
The saddest part was the biggest offenders were not tourists (though they were a huge source of the problem), the worst were the local children. Often, their parents had no history with these new chemical products, and they treated them as though they were the rinds of fruit they were so used to (and often replacing). They usually were just trying to be like the well-to-do people they saw on TV or heard on the radio...
So when organizations like Ecovative come along and at least partially replace the need for these persistent contaminants like styrofoam, it makes me so happy I almost want to cry...
I just hope the waste streams (husks and straw) they're diverting aren't depriving some other system (pigs?mulch?) of nutrients.
Views: 38
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Comment by cameron michael keys on March 8, 2010 at 12:49pm
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speaking of mycelium...have you come across Paul Stamets at the TED conference? http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_...
very inspiring. I live on Kauai where composting is big news. We have a radio shows specifically on gardening and sustainability that really get in to detail. www.kkcr.org , show called "back to the garden". last week there was a dialogue with international soil expert Hendrikus Schraven, who lives on the island -- very interesting person. http://www.hendrikusorganics.com/meettheman.php
i talked with hendrikus at a party last year about a voyage he took to egypt. he was given the opportunity to spend the night in the king's chamber of the great pyramid at giza. Hendrikus agrees the egyptian leaders built the pyramids, among other reasons, to produce a phenomenon called "brush discharge" which turns the nitrogen in the air into nitrate -- fertilizing the crops downwind. crop yields could be increased at least 300%, apparently. JA Burke is the soil scientist who studied brush discharge with magnetometers at Giza, http://www.consciousmedianetwork.com/members/jburke.htm
I'm excited to hear about your work. balancing a rotating flaming stick while doing a backbend?! far out!
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Comment by Nick Heyming on March 8, 2010 at 7:21pm
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I haven't seen his talk at TED, but I love his work and have been eager to get my own mycelium running.
That hendrikus guy sounds awesome. Brush discharge? Thats the coolest theory about the pyramids I've ever heard, and makes a wh*** lot more sense than aliens or burial tombs.
And yes, the martial arts are fun!
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