Biosolids hit the fan
From Sound Consumer magazine
(March 2012)
When Alice Cho Snyder and her husband Mark bought a 13-acre farm near Everett, Wash., last July, they thought they were going to be organic farmers, not the epicenter of a biosolids storm. Shortly after the Snyders closed on the property, Snohomish County officials notified the couple that biosolids were slated to be applied on 250 acres of land bordering their property.
“Biosolids” is a recycling industry term for sewage sludge that has been treated to remove most (or in some cases, nearly all) pathogens. After being somewhat defanged, biosolids are used as fertilizer or soil amendments.
… Read More »Preparation 500
Preparation 500
From The Bear Deluxe magazine (June 2011)
1912 words
To our modern way of thinking, this all sounds quite insane.
– Rudolf Steiner, Lectures on Agriculture, 1924
Allan Balliett got sick in 1980. It came on as a flurry of symptoms, all of which seemed to take roost at once, and no one knew what was wrong or how to fix it. A systems analyst for the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C., Balliet suddenly found himself fatigued, his hair falling out “by the handfuls,” too weak and unfocused to adequately unravel the federal computer network. He says he “serial napped” on weekends 40 hours or… Read More »
Distributing the Pain
Tags | Environment
From The Bear Deluxe magazine
If nature is not a cathedral, then perhaps it is a town meeting, and none the worse for it—a place of intellectual inquiry, give and take, and above all, human responsibility, a place where people seek the truth, bound only by the constraints of common sense and common decency, a place where people make decisions and learn from the consequences. — Stephen Budiansky, Nature’s Keepers: The New Science of Nature Management (The Free Press: 1995)
You think that because you understand one, that you must therefore understand two, because one and one is two. But you forget that you must also understand… Read More »
Are biofuels fueling hunger?
From Sound Consumer magazine (Sept. 2010)
The U.S. Navy celebrated Earth Day this year by running a biofuels test on a supersonic F/A 18 Green Hornet fighter jet powered by a mixture of traditional jet fuel, and oil pressed from Camelina sativa, a relative of the mustard plant.
The test underscores two trends in U.S. energy policy: an almost fanatical reliance on biofuels as a substitute for oil, and the misconception that anything ‘green’ is good — even if it sports Sidewinder missiles and makes the Hummer look fossil-fuel efficient.
Some experts on food security claim otherwise. Once touted as a panacea for America’s energy… Read More »
Asparagus Now
From In Good Tilth magazine: March/April 2010
“Thank you for taking the time to produce this film. I pray that it will spread like modified canola seed to all parts of our culture and open some eyse [sic].”
— Email, from ‘Tyler’, to Deborah Koons Garcia, writer, producer and director of The Future of Food
“I was the East Coast distributor of ‘involved.’ I ate it, drank it, and breathed it … Then they killed Martin, Bobby, and they elected Tricky Dick twice, and people like you must think I’m miserable because I’m not involved anymore. Well, I’ve got news for you ... I have no more pain for anything. I gave at the… Read More »
Who’s Afraid of Cap & Trade
From The Bear Deluxe magazine: June 2009
When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere. Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and not cheat. This neutralises [sic] the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.
—Spoof of Cap & Trade schemes at Cheatneutral.com. “Helping you because you can’t help yourself.”
In 2007, psychologist Paul Slovic and his colleagues conducted an obscure experiment in which starving children in Mali were used to quantify the breaking point of human compassion. His findings, and those of others who… Read More »
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