SaveGaia

Comment on the previous article

2005-07-10T20:02:00.000-07:00

It is perfectly possible to create a different type of agriculture. Cuba (referenced in the paper) did it out of necessity once they were weaned out off Soviet free oil.

Interesting article, although "Peak Oil" is an issue murkier than it seems to be. This article could serve as the base for an argument: Do it now, before you have to, and might not be able to do it at all...

Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply

2005-07-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply
by Richard Heinberg

A paper presented at the FEASTA Conference, "What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?", June 23-25, 2005, Dublin Ireland

http://www.museletter.com/archive/159.html

Food is energy. And it takes energy to get food. These two facts, taken together, have always established the biological limits to the human population and always will.

The same is true for every other species: food must yield more energy to the eater than is needed in order to acquire the food. Woe to the fox who expends more energy chasing rabbits than he can get from eating the rabbits he catches. If this energy balance remains negative for too long, death results; for an entire species, the outcome is a die-off event, perhaps leading even to extinction.

Humans have become champions at developing new strategies for increasing the amount of energy - and food - they capture from the environment. The harnessing of fire, the domestication of plants and animals, the adoption of ards and plows, the deployment of irrigation networks, and the harnessing of traction animals - developments that occurred over tens of thousands of years - all served this end.

The process was gradual and time-consuming. Not only were new tools developed, but, over centuries, small inventions and tiny modifications of existing tools - from scythes to horse-collars - enabled human and animal muscle power to be leveraged more effectively.

This entire exercise took place within a framework of natural limits. The yearly input of solar radiation to the planet was always immense relative to human needs (and still is), but it was finite nevertheless, and while humans directly appropriated only a tiny proportion of this abundance the vast majority of that radiation served functions that indirectly supported human existence - giving rise to air currents by warming the surface of the planet, and maintaining the lives of countless other kinds of creatures in the oceans and on land.

The amount of available human muscle power was limited by the number of humans, who, of course, had to be fed. Draft animals (bred for their muscle-power) also entailed energy costs, as they likewise needed to eat but also had to be cared for in various ways. Therefore, even with clever refinements in tools and techniques, in crops development and animal breeding, it was inevitable that humans would reach a point of diminishing returns in their ability to continue increasing their energy harvest, and therefore the size of their population.

By the nineteenth century these limits were beginning to become apparent. Famine and hunger had long been common throughout even the wealthiest regions of the planet. But, for Europeans, the migration of surplus populations to other nations, crop rotation, and the application of manures and composts were gradually making those events less frequent and severe. European farmers, realizing the need for a new nitrogen source in order to continue feeding burgeoning and increasingly urbanized populations, began employing guano imported from islands off the coasts of Chile and Peru. The results were gratifying. However, after only a few decades, these guano deposits were being depleted. By this time, in the late 1890s, the world's population was nearly twice what it had been at the beginning of the century. A crisis was again in view.

But again crisis was narrowly averted, this time due to fossil fuels. In 1909, two German chemists named Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a process to synthesize ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen in fossil fuels. The process initially used coal as a feedstock, though later it was adapted to use natural gas. After the end of the Great War, nation after nation began building Haber-Bosch plants; today the process produces 150 million tons of ammonia-based fertilizer per year, equaling the total amount of available nitrogen introduced annually by all natural sources combined.

Fossil fuels went on to offer still other ways of extending natural limits to the human carrying capacity of the planet.

Early steam-driven tractors came into limited use in 19th century; but, after World War I, the size and effectiveness of powered farm machinery expanded dramatically, and the scale of use exploded, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia from the 1920s through the '50s. In the 1890s, roughly one quarter of US cropland had to be set aside for the growing of grain to feed horses - most of which worked on farms. The internal combustion engine provided a new kind of horsepower not dependent on horses at all, and thereby increased the amount of arable land available to feed humans.

Chemists developed synthetic pesticides and herbicides in increasing varieties after WWII, using knowledge pioneered in laboratories that had worked to perfect explosives and other chemical warfare agents. Pesticides not only increased crop yields in North America, Europe, and Australia, but also reduced the prevalence of insect-borne diseases like malaria. The world began to enjoy the benefits of "better living through chemistry," though the environmental costs, in terms of water and soil pollution and damage to vulnerable species, would only later become widely apparent.

In the 1960s, industrial-chemical agricultural practices began to be exported to what by that time was being called the Third World: this was glowingly dubbed the Green Revolution, and it enabled a tripling of food production during the ensuing half-century.

At the same time, the scale and speed of distribution of food increased. This also constituted a means of increasing carrying capacity, though in a more subtle way.

The trading of food goes back to Paleolithic times; but, with advances in transport, the quantities and distances involved gradually increased. Here again, fossil fuels were responsible for a dramatic discontinuity in the previously slow pace of growth. First by rail and steamship, then by truck and airplane, immense amounts of grain and ever-larger quantities of meat, vegetables, and specialty foods began to flow from countryside to city, from region to region, and from continent to continent.

William Catton, in his classic book Overshoot, terms the trade of essential life-support commodities "scope expansion."1 Carrying capacity is always limited by whatever necessity is in least supply, as Justus von Liebig realized nearly a century-and-a-half ago. If one region can grow food but has no exploitable metal deposits, its carrying capacity is limited by the lack of metals for the production of farm tools. Another region may have metals but insufficient topsoil or rain; there, carrying capacity is limited by the lack of food. If a way can be found to make up for local scarcity by taking advantage of distant abundance (as by exporting metal ores or finished tools from region A to help with food production in region B, and then exporting food from B to A), the total carrying capacity of the two regions combined can be increased substantially. We can put this into a crude formula:

CC of A+B > (CC of A) + (CC of B)

From an ecological as well as an economic point of view, this is why people trade. But trade has historically been limited by the amount of energy that could be applied to the transport of materials. Fossil fuels temporarily but enormously expanded that limit.

The end result of chemical fertilizers, plus powered farm machinery, plus increased scope of transportation and trade, was not just a three-fold leap in crop yields, but a similar explosion of human population, which has grown five-fold since dawn of industrial revolution.

Agriculture at a Crossroads

All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but, if it proves not to be, then a temporary exuberance of the human species will have been purchased by an eventual, unprecedented human die-off. So how long can the present regime be sustained? Let us briefly survey some of the current trends in global food production and how they are related to the increased use of inexpensive fossil fuels.

Arable cropland: For millennia, the total amount of arable cropland gradually increased due to the clearing of forests and brush, and the irrigation of land that would otherwise be too arid for cultivation. That amount reached a maximum within the past two decades and is now decreasing because of the salinization of irrigated soils and the relentless growth of cities, with their buildings, roads, and parking lots. Irrigation has become more widespread because of the availability of cheap energy to operate pumps, while urbanization is largely a result of cheap fuel-fed transportation and the flushing of the peasantry from the countryside as a consequence of their inability to buy or to compete with fuel-fed agricultural machinery. Roads that cover former cropland are built from oil, and the erection of buildings has been facilitated by the mechanization of construction processes and the easy transport of materials.

Topsoil: The world's existing soils were generated over thousands and millions of years at a rate averaging an inch per 500 years. The amount of soil available to farmers is now decreasing at an alarming rate, due mostly to wind and water erosion. In the US Great Plains, roughly half the quantity in place at the beginning of the last century is now gone. In Australia, after two centuries of European land-use, more than 70 percent of land has become seriously degraded.2 Erosion is largely a function of tillage, which fractures and loosens soil; thus, as the introduction of fuel-fed tractors has increased the ease of tillage, the rate of soil loss has increased dramatically.

The number of farmers as a percentage of the population: In the US at the turn of the last century, 70 percent of the population lived in rural areas and farmed. Today less than two percent of Americans farm for a living. This change came primarily because fuel-fed farm machinery replaced labor, which meant that fewer farmers were needed. Hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of families that desperately wanted to farm could not continue to do so because they could not afford the new machines, or could not compete with their neighbors who had them. Another way of saying this is that economies of scale (driven by mechanization) gave an advantage to ever-larger farms. But the loss of farmers also meant a gradual loss of knowledge of how to farm and a loss of rural farming culture. Many farmers today merely follow the directions on bags of fertilizer or pesticide, and live so far from their neighbors that their children have no desire to continue the agricultural way of life.

The genetic diversity of domesticated crop varieties: This is decreasing dramatically due to the consolidation of the seed industry. Farmers on the island of Bali in Indonesia once planted 200 varieties of rice, each adapted to a different microclimate; now only four varieties are grown. In 2000, Semenis, the world's largest vegetable seed corporation, eliminated 25 percent of its product line as a cost-cutting measure. This ongoing, massive genetic consolidation is also being driven by the centralization of the seed industry (the largest three field seed companies - DuPont, Monsanto, and Novartis - now account for 20 percent of the global seed trade), which is in turn consequent upon fuel-fed globalization.

Grain production per capita: A total of 2,029 million tons of grain were produced globally in 2004; this was a record in absolute numbers. But for the past two decades population has grown faster than grain production, so there is actually less available on a per-head basis. In addition, grain stocks are being drawn down: According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, "in each of the last four . . . years production fell short of consumption. The shortfalls of nearly 100 million tons in 2002 and again in 2003 were the largest on record."3 This trend suggests that the strategy of boosting food production by the use of fossil fuels is already yielding diminishing returns.

Global climate: This is being increasingly destabilized as a result of the famous greenhouse effect, resulting in problems for farmers that are relatively minor now but that are likely to grow to catastrophic proportions within the next decade or two. Global warming is now almost universally acknowledged as resulting from CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Available fresh water: In the US, 85 percent of fresh water use goes toward agricultural production, requiring the drawing down of ancient aquifers at far above their recharge rates. Globally, as water tables fall, ever more powerful pumps must be used to lift irrigation water, requiring ever more energy usage. By 2020, according to the Worldwatch Institute and the UN, virtually every country will face shortages of fresh water.

The effectiveness of pesticides and herbicides: In the US, over the past two decades pesticide use has increased 33-fold, yet, each year a greater amount of crops is lost to pests, which are evolving immunities faster than chemists can invent new poisons. Like falling grain production per capita, this trend suggests a declining return from injecting the process of agricultural production with still more fossil fuels.

Now, let us add to this picture the imminent peak in world oil production. This will make machinery more expensive to operate, fertilizers more expensive to produce, and transportation more expensive. While the adoption of fossil fuels created a range of problems for global food production, as we have just seen, the decline in the availability of cheap oil will not immediately solve those problems; in fact, over the short term they will exacerbate them, bringing simmering crises to a boil.

That is because the scale of our dependency on fossil fuels has grown to enormous proportions.

In the US, agriculture is directly responsible for well over 10 percent of all national energy consumption. Over 400 gallons of oil equivalent are expended to feed each American each year. About a third of that amount goes toward fertilizer production, 20 percent to operate machinery, 16 percent for transportation, 13 percent for irrigation, 8 percent for livestock raising, (not including the feed), and 5 percent for pesticide production. This does not include energy costs for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retailers, or cooking.

Trucks move most of the world's food, even though trucking is ten times more energy-intensive than moving food by train or barge. Refrigerated jets move a small but growing proportion of food, almost entirely to wealthy industrial nations, at 60 times the energy cost of sea transport.

Processed foods make up three-quarters of global food sales by price (though not by quantity). This adds dramatically to energy costs: for example, a one-pound box of breakfast cereal may require over 7,000 kilocalories of energy for processing, while the cereal itself provides only 1,100 kilocalories of food energy.

Over all - including energy costs for farm machinery, transportation, and processing, and oil and natural gas used as feedstocks for agricultural chemicals - the modern food system consumes roughly ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced.4

But the single most telling gauge of our dependency is the size of the global population. Without fossil fuels, the stupendous growth in human numbers that has occurred over the past century would have been impossible. Can we continue to support so many people as the availability of cheap oil declines?

Feeding a Growing Multitude

The problems associated with the modern global food system are widely apparent, there is widespread concern over the sustainability of the enterprise, and there is growing debate over the question of how to avoid an agricultural Armageddon. Within this debate two viewpoints have clearly emerged.

The first advises further intensification of industrial food production, primarily via the genetic engineering of new crop and animal varieties. The second advocates ecological agriculture in its various forms - including organic, biodynamic, Permaculture, and Biointensive methods.

Critics of the latter contend that traditional, chemical-free forms of agriculture are incapable of feeding the burgeoning human population. Here is a passage by John John Emsley of University of Cambridge, from his review of Vaclav Smil's Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food:

If crops are rotated and the soil is fertilized with compost, animal manure and sewage, thereby returning as much fixed nitrogen as possible to the soil, it is just possible for a hectare of land to feed 10 people - provided they accept a mainly vegetarian diet. Although such farming is almost sustainable, it falls short of the productivity of land that is fertilized with "artificial" nitrogen; this can easily support 40 people, and on a varied diet.5

This seems unarguable on its face. However, given the fact that fossil fuels are non-renewable, it will be increasingly difficult to continue to supply chemical fertilizers in present quantities. Nitrogen can be synthesized using hydrogen produced from the electrolysis of water, with solar or wind power as a source of electricity. But currently no ammonia is being commercially produced this way because of the uncompetitive cost of doing so. To introduce and scale up the process will require many years and considerable investment capital.

The bioengineering of crop and animal varieties does little or nothing to solve this problem. One can fantasize about modifying maize or rice to fix nitrogen in the way that legumes do, but so far efforts in that direction have failed. Meanwhile, the genetic engineering of complex life forms on a commercial scale appears to pose unprecedented environmental hazards, as has been amply documented by Dr. Mae Wan-Ho among many others.6 And the bio-engineering industry itself consumes fossil fuels, and assumes the continued availability of oil for tractors, transportation, chemicals production, and so on.

Those arguing in favor of small-scale, ecological agriculture tend to be optimistic about its ability to support large populations. For example, the 2002 Greenpeace report, "The Real Green Revolution: Organic and Agroecological Farming in the South," while acknowledging the lack of comparative research on the subject, nevertheless notes:

In general . . . it is thought that [organic and agroecological farming] can bring significant increases in yields in comparison to conventional farming practices. Compared to "Green Revolution” farming systems, OAA is thought to be neutral in terms of yields, although it brings other benefits, such as reducing the need for external inputs.7

Eco-agricultural advocates often contend that there is plenty of food in the world; existing instances of hunger are due to bad policy and poor distribution. With better policy and distribution, all could easily be fed. Thus, given the universally admitted harmful environmental consequences of conventional chemical farming, the choice should be simple.

Some eco-ag proponents are even more sanguine, and suggest that their methods can produce far higher yields than can mechanized, chemical-based agriculture. Experiments have indeed shown that small-scale, biodiverse gardening or farming can be considerably more productive on a per-hectare basis than monocropped megafarms.8 However, some of these studies have ignored the energy and land-productivity costs of manures and composts imported onto the study plots. In any case, and there is no controversy on this point, Permaculture and Biointensive forms of horticulture are dramatically more labor- and knowledge-intensive than industrial agriculture. Thus the adoption of these methods will require an economic transformation of societies.

Therefore even if the nitrogen problem can be solved in principle by agro-ecological methods and/or hydrogen production from renewable energy sources, there may be a carrying-capacity bottleneck ahead in any case, simply because of the inability of societies to adapt to these very different energy and economic needs quickly enough, and also because of the burgeoning problems mentioned above (loss of fresh water resources, unstable climate, etc.). According to widely-accepted calculations, humans are presently appropriating at least 40 percent of Earth's primary biological productivity.9 It seems unlikely that we, a single species after all, can do much more than that. Even though it may not be politically correct in many circles to discuss the population problem, we must recognize that we are nearing or past fundamental natural limits, no matter which course we pursue.

Given the fact that fossil fuels are limited in quantity and we are already in view of the global oil production peak, the debate over the potential productivity of chemical-gene engineered agriculture versus that of organic and agroecological farming may be relatively pointless. We must turn to a food system that is less fuel-reliant, even if it does prove to be less productive.

The Example of Cuba

How we might do that is suggested by perhaps the best recent historical example of a society experiencing a fossil-fuel famine. In the late 1980s, farmers in Cuba were highly reliant on cheap fuels and petrochemicals imported from the Soviet Union, using more agrochemicals per acre than their American counterparts. In 1990, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Cuba lost those imports and faced an agricultural crisis. The population lost 20 pounds on average and malnutrition was nearly universal, especially among young children. The Cuban GDP fell by 85 percent and inhabitants of the island nation experienced a substantial decline in their material standard of living.

Cuban authorities responded by breaking up large state-owned farms, offering land to farming families, and encouraging the formation of small agricultural co-ops. Cuban farmers began employing oxen as a replacement for the tractors they could no longer afford to fuel. Cuban scientists began investigating biological methods of pest control and soil fertility enhancement. The government sponsored widespread education in organic food production, and the Cuban people adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity. Salaries for agricultural workers were raised, in many cases to above the levels of urban office workers. Urban gardens were encouraged in parking lots and on public lands, and thousands of rooftop gardens appeared. Small food animals such as chickens and rabbits began to be raised on rooftops as well.

As a result of these efforts, Cuba was able to avoid what might otherwise have been a severe famine. Today the nation is changing from an industrial to an agrarian society. While energy use in Cuba is now one-twentieth of that in the US, the economy is growing at a slow but steady rate. Food production has returned to 90 percent of its pre-crisis levels.10

The Way Ahead

The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take time. And it must be emphasized that we are discussing a systemic transformation - we cannot just remove oil in the forms of agrochemicals from the current food system and assume that it will go on more or less as it is. Every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned. And, given the likelihood that global oil peak will occur soon, this transition must occur at a rapid pace, backed by the full resources of national governments.

Without cheap transportation fuels we will have to reduce the amount of food transportation that occurs, and make necessary transportation more efficient. This implies increased local food self-sufficiency. It also implies problems for large cities that have been built in arid regions capable of supporting only small populations on their regional resource base. One has only to contemplate the local productivity of a place like Nevada, to appreciate the enormous challenge of continuing to feed people in such a city such as Las Vegas without easy transportation.

We will need to grow more food in and around cities. Currently, Oakland California is debating a food policy initiative that would mandate by 2015 the growing within a fifty-mile radius of city center of 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city.11 If the example of Cuba were followed, rooftop gardens would result, as well as rooftop raising of food animals like chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs.

Localization of the food process means moving producers and consumers of food closer together, but it also means relying on the local manufacture and regeneration of all of the elements of the production process - from seeds to tools and machinery. This would appear to rule out agricultural bioengineering, which favors the centralized production of patented seed varieties, and discourages the free saving of seeds from year to year by farmers.

Clearly, we must minimize chemical inputs to agriculture (direct and indirect - such as those introduced in packaging and processing).

We will need to re-introduce draft animals in agricultural production. Oxen may be preferable to horses in many instances, because the former can eat straw and stubble, while the latter would compete with humans for grains.

Governments must also provide incentives for people to return to an agricultural life. It would be a mistake simply to think of this simply in terms of the need for a larger agricultural work force. Successful traditional agriculture requires social networks, and intergenerational sharing of skills and knowledge. We need not just more agricultural workers, but a rural culture that makes agricultural work rewarding.

Farming requires knowledge and experience, and so we will need education for a new generation of farmers; but only some of this education can be generic - much of it must of necessity be locally appropriate.

It will be necessary as well to break up the corporate mega-farms that produce so much of today's cheap grain. Industrial agriculture implies an economy of scale that will be utterly inappropriate and unworkable for post-industrial food systems. Thus land reform will be required in order to enable smallholders and farming co-ops to work their own plots.

In order for all of this to happen, governments must end subsidies to industrial agriculture and begin subsidizing post-industrial agricultural efforts. There are many ways in which this could be done. The present regime of subsidies is so harmful that merely stopping it in its tracks might in itself be advantageous; but, given the fact that a rapid transition is essential, offering subsidies for education, no-interest loans for land purchase, and technical support during the transition from chemical to organic production would be essential.

Finally, given carrying-capacity limits, food policy must include population policy. We must encourage smaller families by means of economic incentives and improve the economic and educational status of women in poorer countries.

All of this constitutes a gargantuan task, but the alternatives - doing nothing or attempting to solve our food-production problems simply by applying more technological intensification - will almost certainly result in dire consequences. In that case, existing farmers would fail because of fuel and chemical prices. All of the worrisome existing trends mentioned earlier would intensify to the point that the human carrying capacity of Earth would be degraded significantly, and perhaps to a large degree permanently.

In sum, the transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a utopian proposal. It is an immense challenge and will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society. But in the end it is the only rational option for averting human calamity on a scale never before seen.

Notes

1. William Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980), University of Illinois Press.

2. Flannery, T. F., The Future Eaters (1994), Reed Books.

3. Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (2004), Norton & Norton, p. 4.

4. David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro, "Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy" (1994). See also Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Eating Fossil Fuels," .

5.www.home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/ pdf_reviews/Nature%202001.pdf

6. See, for example, Mae Wan-Ho, Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare?: Turning the Tide on the Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business (2000), Continuum.

7. www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/ Live/FullReport/4526.pdf

8. See, for example, www.growbiointensive.org/biointensive/brocolli.html

9. P. M. Vitousek, et al., "Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis," Bioscience 36 (1986)

10. See, for example, Bill McKibben, "What Will You Be Eating when the Revolution Comes?", Harper's, April 2005. See also Dale Allen Pfeiffer, "Drawing Lessons from Experience,"

11. Conversation with Randy Hayes, Sustainability Director of the City of Oakland, June 2005.

Richard Heinberg is the author of Powerdown - Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World. He is a journalist, educator, editor, and lecturer, and a Core Faculty member of New College of California, where he teaches courses on "Energy and Society" and "Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community."

MOST SEVERE ALERT ON YOUR MOST BASIC FREEDOMS!

2005-07-10T19:50:00.000-07:00

Act Today to keep access to dietary supplements: NO to CAFTA
Please forward this to others.

We must ACT NOW to defend our access to dietary supplements.
CAFTA Section 6 requires the United States, as a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), to revise our food laws and regulations, based on decisions made by the Codex Alimentarius (International Food Code) Commission, or Codex.

This means that no supplements other than the Recommended Daily Value (RDV) (e.g. 60 mg for Vitamin C) will be available without a doctor's prescription. For more info go to: http://www.iahf.com

ACTION STEP 1: Send form letters at http://www.iahf.com and http://ga4.org/campaign/codex

ACTION STEP 2: EMAIL Your Representative this:"I'm a dietary supplement consumer, and I am very concerned about language buried inside of CAFTA and FTAA which broadens and deepens the scope of the WTO's SPS (Sanitary Phytosanitary Measures) Agreement.
Article 3 of the SPS in the WTO Agreement reads "To harmonize sanitary and phytosanitary measures on as wide a basis as possible, Members SHALL base their food safety measures on international standards, guidelines or recommendations."

This threatens to force harmonization of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 to mindlessly restrictive UN Codex standards which would block my access to vitamins and minerals within the therapeutic range, for starters, then other dietary supplements as Codex expands."

ACTION STEP 3: Call your Representative on July 11.

HERE is a phone script to use when calling thru the Capital Switchboard at 202-225-3121 If you're not sure of your representative's names, just give the switchboard operator your zipcode and they'll know and connect you."I urge you to Vote No to the CAFTA agreement, because in Section 6 it requires the United States, as a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), to revise our food laws and regulations, based on decisions made by the Codex Alimentarius (International Food Code) Commission, or Codex.This clause will devastate our current laws concerning access to vitamins, supplements and to health freedom and, as a result, destroy thousands of small businesses, home businesses and health practitioners. "

MORE INFOThe WTO can and has sanctioned nations for not following Codex guidelines. WTO tribunals have ruled against the USA in 42 out of 48 cases. Many of these have been very costly to our economy.Passage of CAFTA would force the "harmonization" of our dietary supplement laws and regulations to international standards, as established by the supranational Codex Commission. Doing so would drastically infringe on the quality of dietary supplements and access to supplements that people like me are used to.The passage of CAFTA could effectively override the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994. CAFTA would restrict our health freedom of choice, destroy thousands of small businesses in the health foods and dietary supplement fields, and negatively impact health care practitioners and the 150 million regular consumers of dietary supplements like myself.

Any arrangement that leads to the banning of thousands of safe products cannot remotely be described as "free trade". There are better ways to promote regional trade. If this cannot be done without threatening my basic right to have access to nutritional choices then we should scrap CAFTA and start over.

Since 70 percent of the US population use dietary supplements, and 40 percent use them on a regular basis, this is a significant constituency, which should not be underestimated.

The Senate has already passed it, but the Washington Post has stated that this battle could be decided in the House by as close a margin as ONE SINGLE VOTE, so our voice ACTUALLY MATTERS!

TOYOTA's Scandalous Behavior! Boycott Toyota! Let them know what you think of their hypocrisy!

2005-06-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

PICKET TOYOTA Sat 7/2, 1-2:30 pm, 801 Santa Monica Blvd. (Corner of Lincoln) in Santa Monica as Toyota crushes RAV4-EV Electric cars (take Lincoln exit from I-10 and turn right), and start organizing for a California-wide BOYCOTT OF TOYOTA!

The general website is http://DONTCRUSH.com . Last week's successful protest pics are on http://DrivingTheFuture.com/dt050625 .

If you can't make the demo, call or email:
Yukitoshi Funo-sama, US Corporate President
Toyota Motor Corp., USA
PO Box 2991, Torrance, CA 90509
(800) 331-4331
yuki_funo@toyota.com

The issue is TRAGIC: Toyota, despite its "green" image, is treating RAV4-EV lease returns differently from others. Normally, lease returns are evaluate and, at worst, sold at auction to car dealers or auto dismantling yards, so the spare parts can be used on other cars of the same make. For example, if you had a Toyota Tercel, and wanted an air conditioner, you could go to the auto parts dealer and purchase one at a discount from the new price, because it had been salvaged from another Tercel.

Not so with the RAV4-EV. Instead of auctioning the car off on the free market, Toyota is CRUSHING and then SHREDDING some of the lease returns. NONE of these valuable parts are made available to auto parts dealers, and NONE of those lease returns are sold on the open market to those who would like to have an Electric car.

Why CRUSH them, if people are willing to pay GOOD MONEY for these clean, gas-free cars? After all, Toyota honorably SOLD (or lease/sold) over 300 RAV4-EV; so some will be out there for years, decades maybe, why not sell the rest?

Why doesn't Toyota use the great good will of RAV4-EV Electric car drivers to help promote its image as environmentally aware? RAV4-EV drivers are grateful, and would help Toyota's plans for a plug-in Prius, but this big resource is being discarded by Toyota.

FIRST APPEARANCE AT SANTA MONICA TOYOTA, 801 Santa Monica Blvd.
(Next week will repeat at the same location, then a party afterward)

Lots of people showed up. There were 10 to 15 RAV4-EV, and too many people to enumerate: Larry M., Chelsea, Alexandra, Colette, Ted, Linda, Jim, Dency, Ms. King, Paul, Zan, Moira, Ms. Houston, Mike, and more, some just joined from other lists. CycleSantaMonica was here, and some DontCrush EV folks may particpate in their bicycle parade this week. I'm sorry not to jot down all the names, but it was a great and noisy event.

MANY PEOPLE WERE SHOCKED THAT TOYOTA IS GOING TO TAKE AWAY SANTA MONICA'S FLEET OF RAV4-EV!

Many asked, "Why is Toyota doing this?". The best answer is that it's a bad policy that was set at the highest levels, and until they notice the bad effects, lower ranks will stick to it. It's our job to bring publicity to the apparent hypocrisy of Toyota espousing "green" stuff, but in reality stopping people from plugging in their cars to clean energy.

One expects "greenwashing" from the likes of ChevronTexaco or GM: but Toyota's CRUSHING and then SHREDDING Electric cars truly astonishes those who are now finding out about it for the first time.

Many people were actually turned away from the dealer, and many others expressed DISGUST with Toyota.

LOTS of support from passer-by, almost all flyers disappeared. There was a table, water and snacks, which will be present next week also.

The dealer promised to telephone Toyota HQ and complain, but don't know if it will get Toyota's attention.

Also this week, there will be a presence at Toyota Torrance HQ from 8AM to 9AM, if you can make it, please call 714-496-1567 for directions.

This is only the beginning...
This is unacceptable behavior, verging on the criminal!

Unless there is IMMEDIATE policy reversal, there is only one proper answer to this scandal:

BOYCOTT TOYOTA!

Today in California... Tomorrow nationwide!

Fahrenheit AgBioTech

2005-06-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

Fahrenheit Agbiotech

(A review by Thomas J. Hoban, from NC State University)

Genetically modified (GM) crops have fallen far short of early expectations in developed markets, and their future acceptance remains uncertain. European opposition has solidified, and studies from Rutgers (Ref.1) and others have shown that US consumers are confused and concerned about GM ingredients in their food. Western consumers are increasingly choosing alternatives to 'industrial' foods, as demonstrated by the rapid growth in the market for organic foods. A recent documentary, "The Future of Food", provides an excellent overview of the key questions raised by consumers as they become aware of GM food. It also is an unabashed attack on the agbiotech industry and its initial products.

The film's writer/director, Deborah Koons Garcia, the widow of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, is a prominent figure in the increasingly vocal antibiotech movement in California. Her film integrates vintage footage (e.g., from the 1973 Asilomar conference) with profiles and personal stories from critics of agbiotech. Agricultural policy expert Charles Benbrook, activist Andrew Kimbrell, and others appear as the film's heroes in a struggle against the release of GM crops into the environment.

The chief villain of the piece is none other than Monsanto, the world's leading producer of GM crops, which is singled out from the rest of the industry [rightfullt so!]. The company's lawsuit against Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser is roundly criticized, along with the broader issues of gene patenting and corporate control of the food supply. One segment highlights the political connections between Monsanto and the highest levels of US government, including former George W. Bush cabinet members Anne Veneman and John Ashcroft. The film indicts Monsanto for excessive influence over government regulation, by virtue of political appointments of key corporate executives at the highest levels of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency and US Department of Agriculture. Monsanto refused Garcia's requests for interviews for the film.

Some of the most disturbing issues raised involve cracks in the regulatory and scientific foundations on which the agbiotech industry rests. Criticism is aimed at the FDA policy of "substantial equivalence" of GM to non-GM crops. The film argues that we don't know enough about the long-term effects of GM crops on human health and the environment. This will be particularly evident as genetic transformations become more complex (i.e., stacked genes) and the foods become functionally non-equivalent (i.e., nutraceuticals. [And potetially very dangerous ones]) The infamous Starlink and Prodigene incidents are highlighted as instances of regulatory problems. The film makes a case for consumer choice through labeling, industry opposition to which further alienates and confuses consumers. Consumers are already choosing non-GM food by buying more pricey organic products.

The film also surveys the key social, economic and ethical issues associated with GM food crops. As most US consumers have little connection with agriculture or the food production system, Garcia contends that many people do not even realize that GM crops end up in our food supply. Much of the European rejection of GM crops is due to the fact that food is more significant to their culture, so they care more about how their food is produced.

Finally, The Future of Food levels important charges against the public land-grant university system, highlighting concerns that have arisen as universities increasingly trade their independence for corporate contributions. Our universities are supposed to ask tough questions, but now there is limited tolerance for dissenting views within the system. The film describes the struggles over tenure between Ignacio Chapela and the University of California, Berkeley, over his outspoken criticism of the university's ties to the biotech industry. Citizens expect universities to serve the public interest [not do dwell in corruption]; in return, academia is expected to pursue intellectual diversity through a truly objective perspective.

As an alternative to GM crops, Garcia presents the case for less industrialized forms of agriculture, such as organic farming —- which now represents the 'gold standard' for many Western consumers. The film also documents a need for locally grown produce to conserve resources, benefit local farmers and ensure better quality, part of a movement known as Community Supported Agriculture.

Those who argue that GM crops are necessary to feed the world should realize that most Western consumers are not convinced. [And very rightfully so, since the claim flirts with the preposterous. On the other hand, corporate profiteers, and particularly the agro-industrial and medical-industrial complexes, keep the lid on vital information, such as the remarkable potential of the Moringa tree to fight hunger in the world, and make a substantial difference in the way we eat.] Research demonstrates that people prefer organic food for a wide array of ethical, emotional and environmental reasons [Ref.2]. In fact, major food companies have [started to] acquire organic brands so they can cater to this upscale market. The agbiotech industry has been warned that food processors and retailers could effectively hamper or even shut down the food biotechnology enterprise if consumer rejection keeps growing.

Though the film unapologetically presents only one side of the issues addressed, Garcia's goal is always clear: To raise consumers' awareness by telling the story of modern, industrial food production and the increasing presence of GM content in our food supply. In the same vein as "Super-size" Me and "Fahrenheit 9/11", "The Future of Food" draws attention to critical questions about food production that need more public debate.

As someone who has monitored the public debate about biotech for 15 years, I welcome this film. The current administration has let the government regulatory system wither on the vine, making good on its 1992 campaign promise to "take the shackles off the industry." Such shortsighted policies are, however, backfiring, as agbiotech increasingly (more and more) struggles for acceptance by Western consumers. (and faces increasing rejection).

REFERENCES

1. Hallman, W.K. et al. Americans and GM food: knowledge, opinion and interest in 2004 (Food Policy Institute, Cook College, Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey; 2004).

2. Organic shoppers may not be who you think they are. Food Marketing Institute (Washington, DC; 2001).

“THE FUTURE OF FOOD”

2005-06-29T21:24:00.000-07:00

MORINGA & “WONDERPLANTS”- CAN YOU GET INVOLVED IN GROWING THEM & HOW? -- MORINGA REFERENCE & BACKGROUND MATERIAL – Ref: MorMat-FOF2

“THE FUTURE OF FOOD”

“The Future of Foods” is a film everyone needs to see. It has its own website at: http://www.thefutureoffood.com/ .

FILM DESCRIPTION: “There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America -- a revolution that is transforming the very nature of the food we eat. The FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade. For more information visit http://www.thefutureoffood.com/ ”.

ABOUT “THE FUTURE OF FOOD”: “My goal was to make a film that gave the average person a clear understanding of how genetic engineering works, from the cellular level to the global level. I'm hoping this film can be a combination of SILENT SPRING, and THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. Once you see it you'll feel compelled to act, even if that means just changing the the kind of food you eat.”~Deborah Koons Garcia.

Deborah Koons Garcia fell in love with filmmaking when she first picked up a Bolex while a student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1970. She was the instigator and Chief Creative Consultant for Grateful Dawg, a documentary about the musical friendship between her husband Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. Grateful Dawg premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and went on to a lively run in film festivals, in theaters and on television. The Future of Food was shown over a dozen times as a work in progress in Mendocino County, California before the March 2004 election and was the primary element in passing “Measure H” which banned all planting of genetically engineered crops in the county, one of the most important of California counties. It was the first time U.S. citizens had an occasion to vote on this very important issue, and they made the right choice. All the people who worked on The Future of Food are proud that our efforts have had a real impact in the real world.

“The Future of Food provides an excellent overview of the key questions raised by consumers as they become aware of GM foods... (The film) draws questions to critical attention about food production that need more public debate.” ~ Film Review by Thomas J. Hoban, Nature Biotechnology Magazine, 03/05, V.23 N3

"This stylish film is not just for food faddists and nutritionists. It is a look at something we might not want to see: Monsanto, Roundup and Roundup-resistant seeds, collectively wreaking havoc on American farmers and our agricultural neighbors around the world. In the end, this documentary is a eloquent call to action." ~ The Telluride Daily Planet

"If you eat food, you need to see The Future of Food..." ~ Newstarget.com

ORGANISE LOCAL SCREENINGS: We highly encourage local groups to organize a film screening with Deborah Koons Garcia (the legendary late Jerry Garcia's widow) as a special guest: Ms Garcia is the CEO of “Lily Films” and the director, writer, producer of this provocative documentary.

One such event, which you could use as a model to arrange yours, was organized on June 26th, 2005 in Pasadena, California, by the itself legendary Dervaes family, a leading proponent of functional organic farming-gardening.

The highly informative Dervaes' site is here: http://www.pathtofreedom.com/a and the announcement for the event itself was here: http://www.pathtofreedom.com/outreach/events/futureoffood.htm .

The Dervaes family runs “PATH TO FREEDOM”, a “Sustainable Living Resource Center & Urban Homestead”, which is slowly becoming legendary and is widely considered as a very successful model of functional organic farming-gardening.

To ask for a Moringa Test Growing Kit or for further inquiry or venture proposals, please email us!

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A major example and analysis of the possible role of the Moringa tree in agriculture.

2005-06-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

http://moringamission.blogspot.com/2005/06/wondertree-100-facts-moringa-fact-31.html

WONDERTREE - 100 FACTS - MORINGA FACT 04 - EXCEPTIONAL ANIMAL FEED

2005-06-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

MORINGA AS LIVESTOCK FEED & PET FOOD

Animals are biological systems exactly like we, human beings, are. The same principles apply, particularly the garbage in-garbage out principle. More, when animals are actually raised for human consumption, there a multiplication effect: Animals become what *they* eat, and we, in turn, become what we eat through them. Junk foods generate junk lives, and animals raised in the way of the agro-industrial complex generate sick and obese humans. Look around you, if you are not yet convinced.

Industrial agriculture, with its bottom-line-oriented practices that totally disregard quality in favor of quantity ultimately produces what we have become at large: Obese, chronically ill, sick and pathetic imitations of a what a human being could be. Considering that the chickens we eat are fed each other's carcasses as well as chicken feces and ground diseased animals, that supermarket beef eats ground-up diseased sheep and roadkill, the same for pigs, and that all this happy crowd is filled to the brim with synthetic hormones and antibiotics, how can we wonder if most of us wallow in chronical illnesses, cancer, heart disease, etc? And the same is true for our pets. At least *we* are not fed seasoned processed animal feces in pellet form. Well, at least not yet.

Could this change? Could farm animals and pets alike be fed healthy foods? Definitely, and the Moringa tree is poised to play a major part in such a necessary change. The agricultural experimental station run by Foidl & Foidl conducted extensive trials using Moringa leaves as cattle feed for both beef and milk cows, swine feed, and poultry feed. The results were as expected, except that, as almost always with Moringa, expectations where not only met, but passed. Moringa is not only concentrated nutrition, but in the raw form, also seems to reduce the activity of pathogenic bacteria and molds, and improve the digestibility of other foods, thus helping farm animals as well as pets express their natural genetic potential. In other words, Moringa is both nutrition and an adaptogen and pro-genetic factor.

BIO-DYNAMIC EFFECTS OF MORINGA-BASED FEEDS

This easily translates in quantifiable results: At the Foidl agricultural station, with moringa leaves constituting 40-50% of feed, milk yields for dairy cows and daily weight gains for beef cattle increased 30%, with no hormones and no antibiotics. Birth weight, averaging 22 kg for local Jersey cattle, increased by 15% to 25%, or 3 to 5+ kgs.

Notice that the high protein content of Moringa leaves must be balanced with other energy food. Cattle feed consisting of 40-50% moringa leaves should be mixed with molasses, sugar cane, young elephant grass, sweet (young) sorghum plants, or whatever else is locally available. The maximum protein and fiber content of livestock feed should be:
Lactating cow: Protein 18%; Fiber 26-30%
Beef cow: Protein 12-14%; Fiber 36%
Lactating sow: Protein 16-18%; Fiber 5-7%
Meat pig: Protein 12-14%; Fiber 5-7%

Because of the particularly high bio-availibity of Moringa proteins and the "natural steroid"-like effect of fresh, raw Moringa, perhaps desirable for human athletes, but dangerous if uncontrolled in animal feeds, particular care must be taken to avoid excessive protein intake. Too much protein in pig feed will increase muscle development at the expense of fat production. In cattle feed, too much protein can actually be fatal, because of the possible adverse effect on the nitrogen bovine digestive cycle.

Nutrient value of Moringa leaves can be increased for poultry and swine through the addition of an enzyme, phytase, to break down the phytates, leading to increased absorption of nutrients such as phosphoric compounds found in Moringa. The enzyme should be simply mixed in with the leaves without heating. It is NOT for use with ruminants. [Companies that sell phytase include Roche (Hoffman-LaRoche), which has distributors worldwide. A typical price for Ronozyme P (also sold as Roxazyme in some regions), a highly active phytase derived from the organism Peniophora lycii, for use in pig and poultry feeds, would be in the order of US$6.00 to $8.00 per kg. One kilo of enzyme at that concentration can treat 3333 kg of broiler chicken feed, the same amount of swine feed, or 5555 kg layer chicken feed. Phytase addition to basal diet linearly increase ash weight in the grower phase. With the exception of proline and glycine, the digestibilities of the other amino acids is linearly increased with phytase. For example, nitrogen excretion is estimated to be reduced by 4.6% when phytase was added to pig diets at a level of 500 U/kg. If you don't know of a local Roche dealer you can find one on the Internet at www.roche.com/vitamins/areas.html or write to their mail order address at Roche Vitamins Inc., PO Box 910, Nutley, NJ 07110-1199, USA.

Cattle were fed 15-17 kg of moringa daily. Milking should be done at least three hours after feeding to avoid the grassy taste of moringa in the milk. With moringa feed, milk production was 10 liters/day and without moringa feed, it was only 7 liters/day. This almost a 45% increase, with NO artificial hormones involved!

With moringa feed, daily weight gain of beef cattle was 1,200 grams/day. Without moringa feed, daily weight gain of beef cattle was 900 grams/day. That's a 33% increase, with NO artificial hormones and NO antibiotics involved!

The only problem was that higher birth weight (3-5 kg) can be problematic for small cattle. Thus, it may be advisable to induce birth 10 days prematurely to avoid problems. Incidence of twin births also increased dramatically with moringa feed: 3 per 20 births, that is, in proportion, 150:1000, as opposed to the usual average of 1:1000. This is actually an incredible increase of 15% in total live births, an astonishing fact that fully illustrates the extraordinary bio-dynamic effects of fresh, raw Moringa greens.

MORINGA LEAF CONCENTRATE

Chickens, for example, will not voluntarily consume moringa leaves or moringa leaf powder. However, about half the protein content can be extracted from the leaves in the form of a concentrate which can then be added to chicken feed (or used in many other ways). The protein content desired in chicken feed is 22%. To obtain the concentrate, mix leaves with water and run the mix through a hammer mill. Heat this mash to 70 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes. The protein will clump and settle to the bottom. After pouring off the liquid, this can then be freeze-dried. Other alternate low-heat or non-heat method can be used to clump the protein.

A somewhat simpler alternative to freeze-drying is to take a pressure cooker and fit in the top a copper tube or steel tube. Take a compressor from an old refrigerator. Link the tube to the compressor inlet and run the compressor. At a temperature of 30 Celsius and about 50 mm of vacuum you can take out most of the water by evaporation in vacuum (in case you need it dry). However, this whole process actually comes to cooking the Moringa, which diminishes its nutritional qualities.

It is preferable to use Moringa raw, as part of a fresh fodder. For this, just take the sludge after sedimentation and mix it with dry fodder until you can handle it as a semidry mass. Then press it through a meat grinder to make homemade pellets. For pig fodder just mix the pellets with the normal fodder. However, be careful not to overdose with protein - fattening pigs need a maximum of 12-14% protein and lactating pigs 16-18% protein.

An alternate method is to use dry leaf cake left after juice extraction, which contain 12-14% protein, and mix it up with other suitable feed components.

PET FOODS

What is said here of farm animal feeds is valid for pet foods. It is less important from a human health point of view, since we don't eat our pets, but there is no doubt that the overall health and appearance (coat, in particular) of pets reacts very well to the addition of Moringa to their diet. Actually, a whole new industry of Moringa-based pet food and care product might arise, once pet owners realize the benefits of adding Moringa to the diet of their animal companions.

(C) Moringa Trust 1998, 2000 & Moringa Mission Trust, 2005. All rights reserved worldwide.

What is Biodynamics? An Introduction To Biodynamic Agriculture

2005-06-01T00:19:00.000-07:00

"An Introduction To Biodynamic Agriculture", originally published in Stella Natura 1995, by Sherry Wildfeuer, was used to create the present document.

What is Biodynamic agriculture? In seeking an answer let us pose the further question: Can the Earth heal itself, or has the waning of the Earths vitality gone too far for this? No matter where our land is located, if we are observant we will see sure signs of illness in trees, in our cultivated plants, in the water, even in the weather. Organic agriculture rightly wants to halt the devastation caused by humans; however, organic agriculture has no cure for the ailing Earth. From this the following question arises: What was the original source of vitality, and is it available now?

Biodynamics is a science of life-forces, a recognition of the basic principles at work in nature, and an approach to agriculture which takes these principles into account to bring about balance and healing. In a very real way, then, Biodynamics is an ongoing path of knowledge rather than an assemblage of methods and techniques.

Biodynamics is part of the work of Rudolf Steiner, known as anthroposophy - a new approach to science which integrates precise observation of natural phenomena, clear thinking, and knowledge of the spirit. It offers an account of the spiritual history of the Earth as a living being, and describes the evolution of the constitution of humanity and the kingdoms of nature. Some of the basic principles of Biodynamics are:

Broaden Our Perspective
Just as we need to look at the magnetic field of the whole earth to comprehend the compass, to understand plant life we must expand our view to include all that affects plant growth. No narrow microscopic view will suffice. Plants are utterly open to and formed by influences from the depths of the earth to the heights of the heavens. Therefore our considerations in agriculture must range more broadly than is generally assumed to be relevant.

Reading The Book Of Nature
Everything in nature reveals something of its essential character in its form and gesture. Careful observations of nature - in shade and full sun, in wet and dry areas, on different soils, will yield a more fluid grasp of the elements. So eventually one learns to read the language of nature. And then one can be creative, bringing new emphasis and balance through specific actions.

Practitioners and experimenters over the last seventy years have added tremendously to the body of knowledge known as Biodynamics.

Cosmic Rhythms
The light of the sun, moon, planets and stars reaches the plants in regular rhythms. Each contributes to the life, growth and form of the plant. By understanding the gesture and effect of each rhythm, we can time our ground preparation, sowing, cultivating and harvesting to the advantage of the crops we are raising. The Stella Natura calendar which is featured in this catalog offers an introduction to this new study.

Plant Life Is Intimately Bound Up With The Life Of The Soil
Biodynamics recognizes that soil itself can be alive, and this vitality supports and affects the quality and health of the plants that grow in it. Therefore, one of Biodynamics fundamental efforts is to build up stable humus in our soil through composting.

A New View Of Nutrition
We gain our physical strength from the process of breaking down the food we eat. The more vital our food, the more it stimulates our own activity. Thus, Biodynamic farmers and gardeners aim for quality, and not only quantity.

Chemical agriculture has developed short-cuts to quantity by adding soluble minerals to the soil. The plants take these up via water, thus by-passing their natural ability to seek from the soil what is needed for health, vitality and growth. The result is a deadened soil and artificially stimulated growth.

Biodynamics grows food with a strong connection to a healthy, living soil.

Medicine For The Earth: Biodynamic Preparations
Rudolf Steiner pointed out that a new science of cosmic influences would have to replace old, instinctive wisdom and superstition. Out of his own insight, he introduced what are known as biodynamic preparations.

Naturally occurring plant and animal materials are combined in specific recipes in certain seasons of the year and then placed in compost piles. These preparations bear concentrated forces within them and are used to organize the chaotic elements within the compost piles. When the process is complete, the resulting preparations are medicines for the Earth which draw new life forces from the cosmos.

Two of the preparations are used directly in the field, one on the earth before planting, to stimulate soil life, and one on the leaves of growing plants to enhance their capacity to receive the light. Effects of the preparations have been verified scientifically.

The Farm As The Basic Unit Of Agriculture
In his Agriculture course, Rudolf Steiner posed the ideal of the self-contained farm - that there should be just the right number of animals to provide manure for fertility, and these animals should, in turn, be fed from the farm.

We can seek the essential gesture of such a farm also under other circumstances. It has to do with the preservation and recycling of the life-forces with which we are working. Vegetable waste, manure, leaves, food scraps, all contain precious vitality which can be held and put to use for building up the soil if they are handled wisely. Thus, composting is a key activity in Biodynamic work.

The farm is also a teacher, and provides the educational opportunity to imitate natures wise self-sufficiency within a limited area. Some have also successfully created farms through the association of several parcels of non-contiguous land.

Economics Based On Knowledge Of The Job
Steiner emphasized the absurdity of agricultural economics determined by people who have never actually raised crops or managed a farm.

A new approach to this situation has been developed which brings about the association of producers and consumers for their mutual benefit. The Community Supported Agriculture movement was born in the Biodynamic movement and is spreading rapidly. Gardens or farms gather around them a circle of supporters who agree in advance to meet the financial needs of the enterprise and its workers, and these supporters each receive a share of the produce as the season progresses. Thus consumers become connected with the real needs of the Earth, the farm and the Community; they rejoice in rich harvests, and remain faithful under adverse circumstances.

"Moringa Manure"

2005-05-30T20:51:00.000-07:00

Natural "Green Manure" Composting of Moringa Shoots

Using Moringa as a green manure can significantly enrich agricultural land. In this process, the land is first tilled. Moringa seed is then planted 1-2.5 cm (1/2 to 1 inch) deep at a spacing of 10x10 cm (4" x 4"), which translates in a density of 1 MSeed per hectare, or 400 KSeed per acre, and byo-dynamic preparations are added as necessary or desired.

That density can even be increased. The only limits to plant density are availability of seed, water, minerals and natural fertilizers. After 25 to 40 days, the seedlings are plowed into the soil to a depth of 15 cm. The land is prepared again for the crop desired. All other conditions being equal, final crop yields should consistently increase by at least 25% compared to unamended plots, and chemical amendment becomes unnecessary as well as undesirable. This method is of particular interest to organic growers.

Seeding can be done mechanically if the seed is first de-hulled. Planting kernels will reduce germination time by up to three days. Be aware that freshness of seed has a direct relation to germination time. The fresher the seed, the shorter the germination time. Old but still viable seed will need soaking for up to 3 days, and an additional up to 2 weeks for germination.

If no tractor is available, a simple method of seeding is to first rototill the soil to a depth of 10 cm, then scatter seed over the soil and rototill again to a depth of 2-3 cm.

(C) Moringa Mission Trust, 2005. All rights reserved worldwide.

Growing Moringa Part II

2005-05-06T00:05:00.000-07:00

CULTIVATION OF MORINGA
adapted from Lowell J. Fuglie and K. V. Sreeja by Dr F. Annenberg

Moringa oleifera is believed to be native to sub-Himalayan tracts of northern India but is now found worldwide in the tropics and sub-tropics. It grows best in direct sunlight under 500 meters altitude. It tolerates a wide range of soil conditions, but prefers a neutral to slightly acidic (pH. 6.3-7.0), well-drained sandy or loamy soil. Minimum annual rainfall requirements are estimated at 250mm with maximum at over 3,000mm, but in waterlogged soil the roots have a tendency to rot. (In areas with heavy rainfall, trees can be planted on small hills to encourage water run-off). Presence of a long taproot makes it resistant to periods of drought. Trees can be easily grown from seed or from cuttings. Temperature ranges are 25-35 degrees Celsius (0-95 degrees Fahrenheit), but the tree will tolerate up to 48 degrees in the shade and it can survive a light frost.

Moringa seeds have no dormancy period, so they can be planted as soon as they are mature and they will retain the ability to germinate for up to one year. Older seeds woll only have spotty germination. Moringa trees will flower and fruit annually and in some regions twice annually. During its first year, a Moringa tree will grow up to five meters in height and produce flowers and fruit. Left alone, the tree can eventually reach 12 meters in height with a trunk 30cm wide; however, the tree can be annually cut back to one meter from the ground. The tree will quickly recover and produce leaves and pods within easy reach. Within three years a tree will yield 400-600 pods annually and a mature tree can produce up to 1,600 pods. Copicing to the ground is also possible, and will produce a Moringa bush is no main new growth is selected, and the others eliminated.

IN THE NURSERY:
Use poly bags with dimensions of about 18cm or 8" in height and 12cm or 4-5" in diameter. The soil mixture for the sacks should be light, i.e. 3 parts soil to 1 part sand. Plant two or three seeds in each sack, one to two centimeters deep. Keep moist but not too wet. Germination will occur within 5 to 12 days, depending on the age of the seed and pre-treatment method used. Remove extra seedlings, leaving one in each sack. Seedlings can be out-planted when they are 60-90cm high. When out-planting, cut a hole in the bottom of the sack big enough to allow the roots to emerge. Be sure to retain the soil around the roots of the seedling.
To encourage rapid germination, one of three pre-seeding treatments can be employed:
1. Soak the seeds in water overnight before planting.
2. Crack the shells before planting.
3. Remove shells and plant kernels only.

IN THE FIELD:
If planting a large plot it is recommended to first plough the land. Prior to planting a seed or seedling, dig a planting pit about 50cm in depth and the same in width. This planting hole serves to loosen the soil and helps to retain moisten in the root zone, enabling the seedlings’ roots to develop rapidly. Compost or manure at the rate of 5kg per pit can be mixed with the fresh topsoil around the pit and used to fill the pit. Avoid using the soil taken out of the pit for this purpose: fresh topsoil contains beneficial microbes that can promote more effective root growth. The day before out planting, water the filled pits or wait until a good rain before out-planting seedlings. Fill in the hole before transplanting the seedling. In areas of heavy rainfall, the soil can be shaped in the form of a mound to encourage drainage. Do not water heavily for the first few days. If the seedlings fall over, tie them to stick 40cm high for support.

DIRECT SEEDING:
If water is available for irrigation (i.e., in a backyard garden), trees can be seeded directly and grown anytime during the year. Prepare a planting pit first, water, and then fill in the pit with topsoil mixed with compost or manure before planting seeds. In a large field, trees can be seeded directly at the beginning of the wet season.

GROWING FROM CUTTINGS:
Use hard wood, not green wood, for cuttings. Cuttings should be 45cm to 1.5m long and 10cm thick. Cuttings can be planted directly or planted in sacks in the nursery. When planting directly, plant the cuttings in light, sandy soil. Plant one-third of the length in the ground (i.e., if the cutting is 1.5m long, plant it 50cm deep). Do not over water; if the soil is too heavy or wet, the roots may rot. When the cuttings are planted in the nursery, the root system is slow to develop. Add phosphorus to the soil if possible to encourage root development. Cuttings planted in a nursery can be out-planted after 2 or 3 months.

SPACING:
For intensive Moringa production, plant the tree every 3 meters in rows 3 meters apart. To ensure sufficient sunlight and airflow, it is also recommended to plant the trees in an east-west direction. When the trees are part of an alley-cropping system, there should be 10 meters between the rows. The area between trees should be kept free of weeds.
Trees are often spaced in a line one meter or less apart in order to create living fence posts. Trees are also planted to provide support for climbing crops such as pole beans, although only mature trees should be used for this purpose since the vine growth can choke off the young tree. Moringa trees can be planted in gardens; the tree’s root system does not compete with other crops for surface nutrients and the light shade provided by the tree will be beneficial to those vegetables which are less tolerant to direct sunlight. From the second year onwards, Moringa can be inter-cropped with maize, sunflower and other field crops. Sunflower is particularly recommended for helping to control weed growth.[1] However, Moringa trees are reported to be highly competitive with eggplant (Solanum melongena) and sweet corn (Zea mays) and can reduce their yields by up to 50%.

PINCHING THE TERMINAL TIPS:
When the seedlings reach a height of 60cm in the main field, pinch (trim) the terminal growing tip 10cm from the top. This can be done using fingers since the terminal growth is tender, devoid of bark fiber and brittle, and therefore easily broken. A shears or knife blade can also be used. Secondary branches will begin appearing on the main stem below the cut about a week later. When they reach a length of 20cm, cut these back to 10cm. Use a sharp blade and make a slanting cut. Tertiary branches will appear, and these are also to be pinched in the same manner. This pinching, done four times before the flowers appear (when the tree is about three months old), will encourage the tree to become bushy and produce many pods within easy reach. Pinching helps the tree develop a strong production frame for maximizing the yield. If the pinching is not done, the tree has a tendency to shoot up vertically and grow tall, like a mast, with sparse flowers and few fruits found only at the very top.

For annual Moringa types, directly following the end of the harvest, cut the tree’s main trunk to about 90cm from ground level. About two weeks later 15 to 20 sprouts will appear below the cut. Allow only 4-5 robust branches to grow and nib the remaining sprouts while they are young, before they grow long and harden. Continue the same pinching process as done with new seedlings so as to make the tree bushy. After the second crop, the trees can be removed and new seedlings planted for maximum productivity.
For perennial Moringa types, remove only the dead and worn out branches every year. Once in four or five years, cut the tree back to one meter from ground level and allow re-growth. Complete copicing is

WATERING
Moringa trees do not need much watering, which make them ideally suited for the climate of places such as Southern California. In very dry conditions, water regularly for the first two months and afterwards only when the tree is obviously suffering. Moringa trees will flower and produce pods whenever there is sufficient water available.
If rainfall is continuous throughout the year, Moringa trees will have a nearly continuous yield. In arid conditions, flowering can be induced through irrigation.

FERTILIZING
Moringa trees will generally grow well without adding very much fertilizer. Manure or compost can be mixed with the soil used to fill the planting pits. Phosphorus can be added to encourage root development and nitrogen will encourage leaf canopy growth. In some parts of India, 15cm-deep ring trenches are dug about 10cm from the trees during the rainy season and filled with green leaves, manure and ash. These trenches are then covered with soil.
This approach is said to promote higher pod yields. Research done in India has also showed that applications of 7.5kg farmyard manure and 0.37kg ammonium sulfate per tree can increase pod yields threefold.[3]
Biodynamic composts yield the best results, with yield increases of of to 50% compared to ordinary composts.

PESTS AND DISEASES
Moringa is resistant to most pests. In very water-logged conditions, Diplodia root rot can occur. In very wet conditions, seedlings can be planted in mounds so that excess water is drained off. Cattle, sheep, pigs and goats will eat Moringa seedlings, pods and leaves. Protect Moringa seedlings from livestock by installing a fence or by planting a living fence around the plantation. A living fence can be grown with Jatropha curcas, whose seeds also produce an oil good for soap-making. For mature trees, the lower branches can be cut off so that goats will not be able to reach the leaves and pods. Termites can be a problem, especially when cuttings are planted.

Among approaches recommended to protect seedlings from termite attack:
· Apply mulches of castor oil plant leaves, mahogany chips, tephrosia leaves or Persian lilac leaves around the base of the plants.
· Heap ashes around the base of seedlings.
· Dry and crush stems and leaves of lion's ear or Mexican poppy and spread the dust around the base of plants.

In India, various caterpillars are reported to cause defoliation unless controlled by spraying. The budworm Noordia moringae and the scale insects Diaspidotus sp. and Ceroplastodes cajani are reportedly able to cause serious damage. Also mentioned as pests in India are Aphis craccibora, the borer Diaxenopsis apomecynoides and the fruit fly Gitonia sp. Elsewhere in the world, where Moringa is an introduced tree, local pests are less numerous.

HARVESTING
When harvesting pods for human consumption, harvest when the pods are still young (about 1cm in diameter) and snap easily. Older pods develop a tough exterior, but the white seeds and flesh remain edible until the ripening process begins.

When producing seed for planting or for oil extraction, allow the pods to dry and turn brown on the tree. In some cases, it may be necessary to prop up a branch that holds many pods to prevent it breaking off. Harvest the pods before they split open and seeds fall to the ground. Seeds can be stored in well-ventilated sacks in dry, shady places.

For making leaf sauces, harvest seedlings, growing tips or young leaves. Older leaves must be stripped from the tough and wiry stems. These older leaves are more suited to making dried leaf powder since the stems are removed in the pounding and sifting process.

References

Fuglie, L., 1999. Producing Food Without Pesticides: Local solutions to crop pest control in West Africa. CTA, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

Morton, J.F. 1991. The Horseradish Tree, Moringa Pterygosperma (Moringaceae) - A Boon to Arid Lands? Economic Botany. 45(3):318-333.

Ramachandran, C., K.V. Peter, and P.K. Gopalakrishnan, 1980. Drumstick (Moringa oleifera): A Multipurpose Indian Vegetable. Economic Botany. 34(3):276-283.

Sreeja, K.V. 2001. Horti Nursery Networks, Tamil Nadu, India. Personal email of 2001/03/26.

Warndorff, T. 2001. Personal email of 2001/03/22.

Perdew, R. 2004. President, Moringa Farms.

Annenberg, F. 1998. Wonderplants of the World - The Moringa Tree.

McAndrew, J. 2005. Biodynamic Food Growers Association.

Growing Moringa Part I

2005-05-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

Growing Moringa for Personal or Commercial Use

Moringa is an ideal plant to grow indoors or in your own backyard. In fact, in the Philippines that is exactly what they do. You can pick its leaves and make it part of a delicious fresh salad, use it in one our many moringa recipes -- It goes especially well with chicken. Or you can dry the leaves to make a delicious green tea. You can also make tea with the leaf powder in a traditional coffee maker. If you have enough leaf, you can dry it and make it into moringa powder, like we do, and use it ‘s concentrated nutrition to balance your diet for increased energy and sense of well being. The possibilities are endless.

For those of you that live in the United States in the Southern and Western states, you are in luck and can grow Moringa outside. Moringa doesn’t like the cold and loses it leaves in the winter. For those of you that have a true winter, where it freezes and snows, we recommend that you plant Moringa in pots, keeping them outside in the spring and summer and bring them inside when it gets cold. A greenhouse is ideal in most areas. The plant will die if it freezes completely but it can withstand a mild frost nonetheless. Moringa loses its leaves when the average temperature drops below 70 degrees.

The 14 Species of Moringa are among the heartiest in the Fauna kingdom. The most common species are Moringa Oleifera and Moringa Stenopetala. Most research done in the areas of nutrition, water purification, livestock feed, vegetable dyes, herbal medicine and oil production are based on the Oleifera species. It is also the most plentiful. So, when we refer to Moringa we are referring to Moringa Oleifera.

Moringa grows in a variety of climates and substandard soils and it is as fast growing as it is hearty. Normal growth ranges from 3-5 meters or 10 to 16 feet per year if left uncropped. It is one of the fastest growing biomasses on the planet when properly nourished. Some varieties are known to grow 7 meters or 23 feet in one year if left unchecked. However, a fully mature Moringa tree rarely grows over 35 feet. The tree reacts very well to pruning, and therefeore can be kept at any height of preference.
In commercial growing, plantation trees are usually cropped so they don’t exceed 3-4 meters or 10 to 13 feet. Such a height allows the harvesters reasonable access and the cropping encourages horizontal growth enabling greater leaf production. In hedge plantations and for intensice leaf production, cropping can maintain the tree to 2-2.5 meters or 6 to 8 feet.

Germinating Seeds for Personal Use
There are several methods of germinating seeds. Some methods may work better depending on the microclimate. Many people have their own methods of germinating seeds so we will just tell you what we have done and what has worked for us and what has worked for growers around the world.

Moringa seeds have wings and are about the size of a large pea. Seeds don’t need sunlight in order to germinate. Here are some suggestions on germination: Soak the seeds for 24 hours; the seed will imbibe the water it needs to germinate from this procedure. Remove the seeds from the solution. Put the seeds in a plastic sandwich bag and store in a warm, dark place like a drawer or cabinet. Germination times range from 3-14 days. Do not add extra water to the bag. Check them every two days. Once the seeds have broken loose from the winged shell, you will notice two shoots protruding from the seed.
Do not let the shoots get too long and thin as they may get fragile and break when handled. One of the shoots will have some ruffled growth at the extremity; this is the shoot that contains the first leaves (cotyledons) and should be the shoot exposed to the sun.
Plant the seeds about ¾ inch beneath the soil surface with the ruffled extremity to the sun. Plant the sprouted seed(s) in a commercial band or a peat pot using a high quality potting soil. Sandy loamy soils will work well also. Use a pot that is at least 18 inches deep if this is the final home for the tree. Moringa loves the sun so make sure they get plenty.

Although the tree is drought tolerant, they may be watered daily, just don’t allow the roots to get soaked for extended periods of time. If you live in a particularly hot zone, don’t expose the baby plants to all day sun. Keep and eye on them, they will tell you if they are getting distressed from too much sun, water or lack of food.
It is a good idea to use pots to get the trees started since you have more control over the care of the tree. Critters will eat the moringa babies if they can. We recommend that you let the potted plants grow at least 8 weeks or longer before transplanting to the ground. When transplanting try not to disturb the root system at all. Like many plants the roots are very vulnerable until they are established in the ground.
If using a plastic pot, before transplanting to the ground, use a long thin blade to loosen the soil from the inside edges of the pot. Turn the band or pot upside down to allow the entire plant and soil to slide out of the container. This prevents disturbing the roots. Have a hole already dug and gently place in the hole. If you are planting more than one tree, space the plants 7-10 feet apart for optimum access to the mature tree. The tree will branch out 3-4 feet from the trunk so this spacing will allow you to walk between trees and let the sunlight to do its job. Of course if you want a wind break, just plant them all at 1 foot intervals, like they do in Africa and India. Moringa is like any plant that appreciates plant food and fertilizers and ample supply of water

Don’t forget, you can always just put the seeds in the ground or a large pot and water. We have found that Moringa is sensitive to the volume of soil in which it begins its life cycle.

Commercial Germination and Planting
If you plan on growing dozens or hundreds of trees then read the following article a world authority on Moringa, Lowell Fuglie. Mr. Fuglie is an expert and reliable source of information on the subject of growing Moringa commercially. Mr. Fuglie is executive director of the Church World Service hunger relief project in Senegal, Africa, and cultivates thousands of Moringa trees in that region.

FIGHTING CRIME & NEGLECT WITH GARDENING

2005-05-05T03:35:00.000-07:00

People For Park's Garden NOW

at the Los Angeles "Eastside Boys and Girls Club" will be featured as a unique program for "Kids at Risk" on a 30-minute special, FOX TV-channel 11 at 10:30 pm, Friday, May 6, 2005. Please tune in for this exciting environmental program event and see how our gardens grow healthy kids!

Leo Paniagua is interviewed by Cynthia Gonzales, FOX-TV, channel 11 during the shooting of the Garden NOW gardening program. Garden NOW has been conducted by Carlos Figueroa of People For Parks at the Eastside Boys & Girls Club for the past three years.

Garden NOW is a extraordinary successful community garden program with gardens in East and South Los Angeles. Garden NOW is also part of KIDS on Track partnership program with LA City Park's Exposition Park Intergenerational Center (EPICC), beginning June 27, 2005.

For more information, contact Virginia Palmer at People For Parks
www.peopleforparks.org

WONDERPLANTS - MORINGA, THE MIRACLE TREE

2005-04-16T06:56:00.000-07:00

Wonderplants V - Miracle Trees

Ever heard of Azadirachta Indica, the neem tree from India, a tree that holds insects in check like no artificial pesticide can, and against which almost no pest ever managed to build defenses?

Ever heard of Paulownia Tomentosa, a tree which can grow to 85 feet or 27 meters in 7 years, and fixes carbon and nitrogen like mad, producing animal feed, natural fertilizer and the most valuable lightweight but sturdy wood? A wood considered so sacred in the Orient, that Japanese emperors can only be buried in coffins made out of it?

And king of all, have you ever heard of Moringa Oleifera and its cousin Moringa Stenopetala, the completely ~edible~ trees (roots included) that produces delicious leaves with 2 times the protein and 4 times the calcium in milk, 3 times the potassium in bananas, and 7 times more Vitamin C than oranges? And pods with 2 times the protein in beans, as well as oil as valuable as olive oil, but with a touch of flax seed oil added, almost as an afterthought? To say nothing about the fact that it has been widely hailed as "a natural multi-vitamin and minerals pill."

Most probably, you haven't.

Why? In the case of these trees, no need to imagine some dark conspiracy working hard on keeping you and your family good and dedicated lifelong customers of the medical-industrial complex, like the case can be made it is so with artificial sweeteners, a substantial cause of diseases in this country, or frankenfoods (also known as "Genetically Modified Organisms" or GMOs). A good introduction to the problem of GMOs can be found here:
http://www.thefutureoffood.com/ . With Neem, Paulownia and, even more so, Moringa, it's just the effect of plain lack of information.

We intend to change that, and invite you to join the growing movement of people involved in doing so!

A new quote, by Otto Warburg, MD, PhD, Twice Nobel Laureate in Medicine

2005-04-08T21:30:00.000-07:00

"Cancer does not appear by accident, and consequently, I would not eat anything treated with chemicals in any way, that's why I mainly eat what we grow in our own organic garden."

Otto Warburg, MD, Twice Nobel Laureate in Medicine, 1970, to Amb. Dr Hans von Reichmann.

A couple quotes on enzymes.

2005-04-01T02:11:00.000-08:00

Enzymes help for inner radiance, enhanced digestion, and nutrient absorption. They are great for helping digestion of fats, proteins, starches, cooked foods, etc.

The discovery of enzymes is one of the greatest breakthroughs ever achieved in nutrition. Only raw foods and enzyme supplements contain enzymes. Enzymes are destroyed by the cooking process. Enzymes help with weight loss, they accelerate detoxification/cleansing and greatly assist the digestive process - they transform amino acids, fats, starches, and minerals. Enzymes also increase nutrient assimilation and help rejuvenate aged skin and internal organs.

"Adaptogenic foods, such as ginseng (Panax ginseng), goji or wolfberries (Lycyum barbarum) or Moringa (M. oleifera and M. stenopetala) are such to a large extent because they bring us numerous enzymes and enzymatic co-factors in synergistic combinations." -- Francis Annenberg, PhD.

"Enzymes are catalysts. They are transformative elements. They are truly an alchemical symbol of transformation. On a physical level, enzymes help to overcome digestive lethargy. On a spiritual level, enzymes help to overcome life's ruts and setbacks - enzymes overwhelm spiritual stagnation... If you want things to change for you, if you want to attract and create beauty in your life, you have to do something different than you are doing now. If you desire a different destiny (destination) than relatives and friends who ended up dead broke or dead at the age of 65, then you must do something different now. Food enzymes make the difference." -- David Wolfe, in "Eating For Beauty".

A new quote...

2005-03-31T00:01:00.001-08:00

A new quote...

2005-03-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

A new quote...

Another quote

2005-03-27T20:07:00.000-08:00

Another quote...

Another quote

2005-03-24T22:45:00.000-08:00

Another quote...

The right way of eating...

2005-03-21T23:49:00.000-08:00

While held a prisoner in Babylon, Biblical Prophet, Daniel refused to eat the meat offered by the king but asks for Pulse and water instead. At the end of his stay he is found to be wiser than all the wise men in the kingdom.

Then the king commanded Ashpenaz,his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility. Youths without blemish, handsome and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competant to serve in the king's palace, and to teach them the letters and the language of the Chaldeans.

The king assigned them a daily portion of rich food which the king ate, and of the wine which he drank.They were to be educated for three years, and at the end of that time they were to stand before the king.

Among these were Daniel, Haniah, Mishael, and Azariah of the tribe of Judah. But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's rich food., or with the wine which he drank; therefore he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs; and the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, "I fear lest my lord, the king, who appointed your food and your drink, should see that you were in poorer condition than the youths who are of your own age. So you would endanger my head with the king."

Then Daniel said to the steward whom the chief of the eunuchs had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah; "Test your servants for ten days; let us be given pulse to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king's rich food be observed by you, and according to what you see deal with your servants."

So he hearkened to them in this matter, and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king's rich food. So the steward took away their rich food and the wine they were to drink, and gave them pulse.

As for these four youths, God gave them learning and skill in all letters and wisdom: and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. At the end of the time, when the king had commanded that they should be brought in, the chief of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar. And the king spoke with them and among them all none was found like Daniel, Hanaiah, Mishael, and Azariah; therefore they stood before the king.

And in every matter of wisdom and understanding concerning which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom.

Another piece of iconoclasm, by George Carlin -- with perhaps some truth in it...

2005-03-16T23:59:00.000-08:00

For All the Environmentalist tree huggers

We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? ...

....Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.

You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.

A bit of iconoclasm: A non-environmentalist view of things...

2005-03-15T00:50:00.000-08:00

Capitalism is best way to save the planet
Economic View by Anatole Kaletsky
from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,630-402384,00.html

THE Johannesburg summit on sustainable development has been widely ridiculed for emitting more hot air than a coal-fired power station. Tony Blair’s African speeches have certainly left us no wiser about his personal plan to save the world. Yet behind all the empty rhetoric, the cynical photo-opportunities and the bureaucratic self-indulgence, some enormously important issues have been opened up for discussion in the past two weeks.
In saying this, I do not mean to contribute to the hysteria about mankind’s survival and the threat posed by global warming to life on earth. Still less do I believe that “Africa is a scar on the conscience of our world and the world has a duty to heal it”, to quote Mr Blair.

Global warming may well be a serious threat to human welfare. The poverty, disease and barbarism rampant in much of Africa is certainly an indictment of the way that almost all African countries have been run in the colonial era and the post-colonial decades. But the outside world has neither the moral authority nor the will to stop Africans committing mass suicide through Aids. The true scale of climate change and its effect on mankind’s future, will be unclear for many decades, probably until most of us are dead.

Both as an economist and a human being I have always believed in focusing on the present and the immediate future, leaving the long-term to look after itself. The reason for doing this is not a contempt for future generations, but quite the contrary. Any attempt to look many decades ahead and then to inflict our flawed ideas on future generations, is an exercise in overweaning arrogance.

Moreover, the experience of the past two centuries suggests that the generations of the future will be infinitely cleverer than we are. They will devise solutions to their problems with an ingenuity that we cannot begin to imagine today. It is not just lazy and selfish to leave the solution of many long-term problems to future generations; it is rational. It is right to delay difficult decisions as long as possible in the hope that “something will turn up” and only to make painful choices at the eleventh hour.

Having laid out this sceptical credo, let me jump straight to my personal conclusions from Johannesburg. The homilies on aid, disease and sanitation will be of little value until we see dramatic political changes in the poor countries themselves. The fact is that competent and honest economic management, plus the avoidance of wars, are infinitely more important conditions for development than any conceivable inflow of external aid. But turning from the pieties on poverty to the environmental negotiations which were the summit’s real issue, Johannesburg could go down in history as one of the major events of the early 21st century, eclipsing even September 11.

Firstly, the summit has made progress on such urgent environmental issues as fish stocks, deforestation and water supplies. The damage to human welfare from overfishing, uncontrolled logging and water pollution has gone so far and has become so palpable that these problems easily pass the eleventh-hour test suggested above. Secondly, and even more importantly, the summit has brought climate change to the centre of attention. It could mark the start of a period of much more intensive government intervention and business activity on carbon emissions and energy policy, at least outside the US.

Despite my general scepticism about long-term planning, I think such action could be beneficial, not only to our children’s environmental future, but also to our own prosperity and safety and even to global economic growth. The idea that trying to control the human contribution to climate change could be an economic opportunity, and not just a sacrifice, has long been the missing element in the global warming debate. The fact is that a concerted global campaign against climate change could present opportunities of at least three kinds.

The first benefit would be scientific and technological progress, as moribund industries such as carmaking and energy extraction were given incentives to move to the cutting edge of technological progress. Government subsidies for energy research could have far more productive spin-offs than defence and space programmes. It has always struck me that car manufacturers and oil companies reveal extraordinary managerial incompetence when they oppose government regulations to reduce emissions, increase fuel economy and develop new zero-emission engines. These companies are at present stuck in commodity businesses with ever-dwindling profit margins, few competitive advantages and a dinosaur image among investors, leading to extremely low stock market valuations. They would be far better off emulating computer companies and competing in the development of new technology. Government regulations to reduce emissions would help them to limit competition, thereby increasing, rather than stunting, their profits.

The second benefit would be geopolitical stabilisation, as fundamentalist Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran lost their grip on the world’s jugular through the oil price.

The third benefit would be greater trade integration and the possibility of a moderate redistribution of income from rich countries to poor.

To see why this might be so, consider the ambitious target for reducing carbon emmissions suggested two years ago by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Its proposal was to reduce emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, possibly through an international agreement called Contraction and Convergence, which has been much discussed in Johannesburg. This would give every country a quota for carbon emissions, based on its population and would allow countries to trade these emission rights. This would gradually reduce worldwide carbon emission and encourage the development of more efficient technologies. In the meantime, it would ensure a flow of funds from rich countries to poor ones, which, because of their lower levels of car ownership and industrialisation, would have surplus emission rights.

This Contraction and Convergence concept, illustrated in the charts above from the website of the Global Commons Institute, is only one of many market-based proposals designed to create incentives for big emissions cuts without unduly disupting global economic growth.

Yet politicians, business lobbies and anti-growth environmentalists have all, for their own reasons, emphasised the economic sacrifices required to control climate change. We hear constantly of the limits to growth implied by energy conservation and the mind-boggling trillions of dollars that will have to be sacrificed either to reduce global warming or to cope with its destruction.

Yet all these horrific figures are meaningless unless presented in context. For example, Mr Blair noted in Africa that the Kyoto protocol would only reduce greenhouse emissions by 1 per cent, whereas the British Government believes that a 60 per cent reduction is needed. Given that President Bush has put the cost of meeting the Kyoto targets at several hundred billion dollars, a price he regards as unacceptable, what hope could there possibly of making any worthwhile progress? But what Mr Blair has failed to point out in his messianic fervour, is that the ambitious 60 per cent target is only due to be achieved by 2050. The magic of compound interest could make this quite feasible without any undue economic sacrifice. According to the authoritative report published in February this year by the DTI’s inter-departmental analysts group for Britain to meet the 60 per cent target would require a reduction of 4.3 per cent a year in the intensity of carbon emissions, assuming GDP growth continued at its long-term trend rate of 2.25 per cent.

This would be only slightly higher than the historic trend of carbon intensity reduction, which has been running at 3 per cent a year since 1970. Using a slightly different methodology, the same report concludes that the cost of reducing carbon emissions by 60 per cent in 2050 and then stabilising them from that point onwards would be equivalent to between 0.2 per cent and 1.5 per cent of GDP.

Even in the absence of firm evidence on the precise scale or effects of global warming, this would be a very small price to pay for the potential benefits of reducing air pollution, not to mention the political and technological breakthroughs mentioned above.

In Johannesburg, the concept that global action on climate change could be an economically beneficial exercise, instead of an immense sacrifice began to make an appearance. This was partly because many environmental organisations started to engage in a more constructive economic dialogue with businesses and governments instead of trying to turn the global warming issue into a weapon in a global war against capitalism and modern science.

Modern science and market economics, far from being the enemy of the environment, are by far the most powerful mechanisms ever developed for achieving human objectives. If the world needs to be saved, they are by far the best tools available to mankind. It is time to put them to good use.

Another quote

2005-03-14T23:56:00.000-08:00

"Water the element of life", by Theodor Schwenk

2005-03-13T23:29:00.000-08:00

Based on Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and their own experiments, the authors show that the earth is a living organism and that water is its sense organ, perceiving vital cosmic influences and forces and transmitting these into earthly life.

Theodor Schwenk (1910-1986) was a pioneer in water and flow research. He founded the Institute for Flow Sciences for the scientific study of water's movement and life-giving forces. As engineer Schwenk began work in the research institute at Voiths in Heidenheim. He moved to Aerodynamics before the war and was able to study the world literature on Flow Research and work with Viktor Schauberger. In 1946 he moved to Weleda in Schwaebisch Gmuend, where he could eventually set up a laboratory to study effects of constellations and potentisation on germination and plant growth. 'Grundlagen der Potenzforschung' 1954.

A well-known author and lecturer, at Weleda he contributed original insights and methods to the production of homeopathic, anthroposophic medicines. He developed "drop-pictures" for analyzing water quality and methods for healing polluted, "dead" water. Schwenk gained public recognition with the publication of Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air.

In a way, Theodor Schwenk reminds very much of Masaru Emoto, the author of "The Hidden Messages in Water" (or vice-versa, as you want to look at it).

In 1961, he was the co-founder and Director of the the German Institute of Flow Sciences [Institut für Stroemungswissenschaften], now directed by his son Wolfram Schwenk.

In relation to fresh water that is essential to all life and accounts for only 3% of all water resources on earth, the Institute for Flow Sciences in Herrischreid, Germany has pioneered methods of visually recording the internal movement and fluid structures of fresh water. A major goal of this work is to bring forth a new understanding of the sensitivity and complexity of water and to establish new benchmarks for judging the purity of public water.

"We are concerned that the natural sources of water be cared for and appreciated by the public both for their public utility and their essential beauty," says Wolfram Schwenk, a principal researcher and one of the directors of the Institute. "Wherever Water appears, as moisture in the soil from which it runs as brooks, streams, rivers to fill up ponds, lakes, and even oceans, water becomes the life-giver, and simultaneously provides a viable environment for an endless number of microorganisms, plants and animals."

"Once water is brought into motion, it reveals a wide variety of activities. It becomes the medium for all different sorts of shape-forming processes and the place wherein there is an inexhaustible activity of renewal and recreation of forms."

"Through methods pioneered by my father, Theodor Schwenk, we have developed a systematic way of looking at the internal behavior of water and documenting its movements. The characteristics distinguishing water as a means for sustaining life become activated when water is in motion, and water’s mobility is one of its most important characteristics.

When water is mobile, it has the potential to reorganize itself. If we incorporate mobility as a factor to be included in qualitative analyses of given samples of water, then we can expand efforts beyond traditional chemical analyses to determine water’s quality and its organizational potential.

Through the Drop-Picture Method pioneered by Theodor Schwenk, we have been able to develop a scientifically reliable procedure for revealing this aspect of water. And we have been able to establish a benchmark that can be used in conjunction with other analyses to determine the relative purity of different kinds of water."

The remarkable images developed by the Institute in recent years enable people to see movements of water normally invisible to the human eye. Fresh spring water, uncontaminated by pollutants, shows an almost infinite capacity for continuous and multi-formed movement, creating an enormous variety of complex shapes.

Among the green, tree-covered hills of the southern Black Forest, German engineer Theodor Schwenk found clear spring water that could serve as an example of water’s wondrous capacity for movement - the ability of the tiniest drop of water to create infinitely varied and beautiful shapes.

As one radiating circular form follows another in the Drop-Pictures, it is clear that the internal movements of water are never linear. The images create an enhanced understanding of water and its simultaneous ability to mold its surroundings and adapt to the external forms that surround it.

The refinement of this Drop-Picture methodology is drawing many waterworks professionals to the Institute to find ways to enhance more traditional measurements of the quality of water that cities and towns are delivering to their citizens. The city of Amsterdam is one beneficiary of the Institute’s investigations. In using the Drop-Picture Method alongside other analyses to develop new parameters for public water quality, Amsterdam was able to improve the quality of its public water and Amsterdam citizens are said to have among the best potable water in Europe today.

The Institute is also studying how water’s capacity for movement can affect water’s capacity for self-purification after being contaminated with pollutants. In the mid 1990’s, the Institute participated in a study of the Mettma, a small Black Forest stream contaminated upstream by brewery and domestic wastewater. The contents of the water and organic life were analyzed over an eight-kilometer stretch of the water downstream from the point of wastewater discharge.

Taking water samples at various distances from the source of pollution and putting these samples through the drop-picture process, a remarkable documentation was developed. It shows the relationship between water quality and the differentiation of organic life in polluted and less polluted water. The images show a clear correlation between the point where the stream water was able to regain its pre-pollution condition and the development of more sophisticated life forms.

"Our concern at the Institute is to help people ‘see’ water in a new way," says Schwenk, "To appreciate its complexity and capacity to generate and serve life."

FotoFest 2004 presented a special exhibition of images of the hidden movements of water and the Institute’s development of the Drop-Picture Methodology. The exhibition will also show how sensitive water is to external materials, even the smallest amount of pollutant material. It will include the visual study of the Mettma stream.

The philosophy and work of the Institute has also inspired the work of German artist and urban designer Herbert Dreiseitl’s whose use of water in urban environments are attracting attention of cities throughout the world and top architects such as Sir Norman Foster and Renzo Piano.

"Long before the advent and popularity of the chaos theory, Theodor Schwenk had understood the relations between chaos, the emergence of form, and the sensitive dependence of initial conditions that characterize the chaotic state in nature and in theory. His important work has never been surpassed." Ralph Abraham, University of California Professor of Mathematics and author of "Chaos, Gaia, Eros: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers the Three Great Streams of History"

"From space, the Earth is seen as a water planet; less than thirty percent is land. Our sister planets Mars and Venus were made of the same stuff when they started, but are now drier than any conceivable desert on Earth. We know that without water there can be no life, but also it is true that without life, there can be no water. In Sensitive Chaos, Theodor Schwenk teaches us about this wonderful connection between water and life. So movingly and well told is his tale that you will not want to put the book down until the end." James Lovelock, scientist and author of "Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth".

Water is more than a mere flow of energy or a useful means of transport. Why does water in streams and rivers always take a winding course? Do common principles and rhythms guide the movement of water, whether in the sea or in a plant or in the blood of a human being?

More than ever before, today we need "water consciousness" and we can begin with this essential and classic book on water as the universal bearer of living, formative processes. Beginning with simple flowing phenomena of water and air, Schwenk gradually builds up, with the help of marvelous photographs and drawings, the "letters" of an alphabet that will allow us to "read" the living meaning of water.

Schwenk's books gradually brought in the formative processes to light, and we come to see the creative word in the universe. This is an important work for a deeper understanding of a fundamental element of life.

These books are lavishly illustrated. Here is an Amazon link for it:

Another Quote...

2005-03-12T19:51:00.000-08:00

Another Quote...

2005-03-12T19:44:00.000-08:00

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” (My First Summer in the Sierra, quoted in The American Wilderness in the Words of John Muir [Waukesha, Wisconsin: Country Beautiful, 1973], p. 60.)

An unlikely duo uniting to save the planet...

2005-03-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

Here is an old article of interest....
April 21, 1996

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A seemingly unlikely alliance of religious and scientific groups has been formed for a common cause -- to protect the environment.

They are the odd couple at a growing number of save-the- planet meetings.

"They don't have to agree on how and why the Earth was created in order to work together to cherish and protect it," said Paul Gorman of the National Religious Partnership on the Environment.

The Union of Concerned Scientists put together a videotape to encourage joint efforts with religion. The tape includes the biblical account that God created the Earth.

To demonstrate even further the ties between nature and religion, the videotape shows the blessing of an elephant and a procession of animals at a New York church.

"The common ground between science and religion is that this is a moral enterprise...caring for the earth," said Rev. Drew Christiansen of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

At a Catholic high school in Bladensburg, Maryland, science teachers are using the connection between religion and nature in the curriculum.

Students are learning about their environment by caring for a nearby nature trail.

"It has to be both of them... the drive and the energy and the passion of religion, as well as the scientific aspects and the knowledge of science," said Sister Mary Jo Stein of St. Elizabeth's Seton Catholic High School.

For the class, religion and the environment go hand in hand.

"I feel like God gave us this gift, so it's our job to protect it," said Dione Washington, a student. (65K AIFF sound or 65K WAV sound)

But there is a limit on how far religion and science can agree.

"I don't think we're going to resolve all disagreements overnight," said Rabbi Ismar Schorsch of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

"But even the silly notion that creationism is equivalent to scientific theory has a kernel of value and that is that creationism does stress the ultimate unity of all existence," Schorsch said.

While it is too soon to tell whether science and religion can work together, many in both groups share a common belief that the environment is threatened and people of all kinds must try to save it.

From Correspondent Anthony Collings

Save The Planet, the song...

2005-03-10T22:23:00.000-08:00

We found the following, which could be of interest to some reader:

This gentleman wrote a song called "Save The Planet". he need a signed artist to record it for a label. He hopes it can help improve global management and usher in world peace.

SAVE THE PLANET

We're floating on a grain of sand in the vastness of space
If future generations are going to inherit this place
We've got to Save The Planet
Do something while there's still time
Save The Planet
This earth is yours and mine

The tropical rainforest is disappearing more everyday
We'll never replace it, we'd better not burn it away
Save The Planet
The wonders of nature are free
Save The Planet
Have you ever planted a tree?

If the skies are blue
And the oceans too
Isn't this a better home for me and you?
If the air is clean
And the land is green
Wouldn't you like to be part of this lovely scene?

I'm thinking of the animals that once roamed the African plain
Their numbers have dwindled, and pretty soon none will remain
Save The Planet
Do something while there's still time
Save The Planet
This earth is yours and mine

Save The Planet
The wonders of nature are free
Save The Planet
Have you ever planted a tree?

Save The Planet
Save The Planet
Save The Planet
Save The Planet

(C) 2005 J.C. ASCAP

If you are interested, ask for his email.

More on Moringa 1

2005-03-09T19:34:00.000-08:00

is on its way...

According to energy expert, the global warming we are experiencing is entirely unnecessary -- if we would pursue long available alternatives!

2005-03-07T19:01:00.000-08:00

According to energy expert, the global warming we are experiencing is entirely unnecessary -- if we would but just pursue alternatives that have been available for so long.

Tom Valone Reviews a Myriad of Alternative Energy Technologies

Report on his lecture at the New Energy Movement Conference, Sept. 25, Portland, Oregon, USA. by T. Cullen and Susan M. Carter -- Pure Energy Systems News

Tom Valone, President of Integrity Research Institute (IRI), speaking at the New Energy Movement conference was a powerhouse of knowledge and facts and gave a thorough overview of where we are currently at with energy needs and where we could go in the future to meet those needs.

His first blockbuster fact caught the audience’s attention immediately; 85% of energy today comes from the combustion of dead fossils, forcing the world’s atmosphere to overheat. We are likely seeing the results of global warming in our weather such as the four hurricanes in Florida.

Valone commented that Hubbard’s Peak – the peak of oil production – is right on the projected mark for the US. Most alarming is that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at three hundred parts per million (ppm), the highest it has been in 400,000 years and may reach six hundred ppm by 2050.

Further evidence of global warming are the liquid lakes at the North Pole. The ice cap is rapidly disappearing, which effects the reflected solar radiation, causing other global weather changes. Valone warned ominously that a sixth to eighty percent reduction in carbon emissions is required to stop global warming.

The most frustrating fact of all, he stated, was that two thirds of all the electricity produced in the US is wasted.

IRI is researching the following energy solutions:
• atmospheric electricity
• nuclear
• quantum vacuum zero point
• space propulsion energy
• magnetic motors

Atmospheric Electricity

Ben Franklin almost had it clear back in the 1700’s. Electrostatic motors have been known about since the beginning of this country. One motor has been operating for eighty-six years and counting. Reference was made to the American Journal of Physics, 1971, pg. 778, regarding the 200 Gigawatt potential in the atmosphere.

The most promising technology has been known about nearly one hundred years: Tesla’s Wardencliff tower and scalar waves. Valone has researchers that have analyzed every part and verified each component of Tesla’s system to broadcast power worldwide. IRI is currently working to rebuild a Wardencliff tower.

Nuclear

Nuclear power is about more than just nuclear power plants. Valone told the NEM audience about nuclear batteries and the work by Betavoltaics and Nuclear Solutions. He mentioned Paul Brown’s patents for extracting energy safely from radioactive materials without nuclear power plants.

A very promising development in the works is the photo-remediation of nuclear waste, and a method of using iodine to produce power. The studies in this field are showing one Megawatt in produces twenty Megawatts out.

Proton – Boron fusion was mentioned, where the reaction between a proton and Boron produces Helium with no radioactivity. Dense plasma is focused in a unique device which produces the 1 billion degrees necessary to make Hydrogen and Boron fuse together into Helium without high energy neutrons being released. A garage-sized fusion reactor would produce energy ten times better than the Tokamak Reactor currently does. (See www.focusfusion.org for more information).

Quantum Vacuum Zero Point

Valone next spoke about the controversial quantum vacuum and zero point energy, pointing out that zero-point energy is NOT conserved. The energy density of zero-point energy is debatable.

Many areas in this field are being studied: the Casimer Force, electron-positron production, electron charge cluster technology, toroidal fields, solid state diodes, and other devices. Electron charge clusters are showing nine times over unity. Electric Arc Discharge Accelerators also have more potential energy out than electrical energy in. We may someday rectify thermo-electric noise with diode circuits

On the positive side of this debate, over unity (and its synonyms) are being mentioned in mainstream literature. Dr. Peter Graneau is getting 150% efficiency outputs and has been published in peer reviewed journals. Pinto actually mentioned “free energy” in his abstract published in Physical Review Rev. B, 60 21, 1999 p. 4457. He uses micro lasers and nanotechnology to get huge improvements in the Casimer force (one Kilowatt per meter squared). Valone further mentioned that Feigle was the first physicist to use ZPE to satisfy energy conservation.

Space Propulsion Energy

Quantumfields.com discusses a hydrodynamic model of vehicle interactions with zero-point energy as it loses its drag at 0 degrees Kelvin. Valone described the works of Paul H. Hill on inertial control, and how the apparent 90 degree right hand turns by UFOs can be explained with knowledge of zero-point energy and inertia. A discussion on space propulsion energy would not be complete without discussing the gravity work of T.T. Brown and John Searl.

Valone briefly mentioned his own past work on homopolar generators, and the current work by Roshin and Godin. He reminded the group that homopolar generators produce a seven degree drop in temperature in the area around the generator.

Magnetic Motors

Valone is currently most interested in a magnetic motor design by South African, Mike Brady. Because he could not find any patent information, he said he supposed the design is public domain. (See freeenergynews.com for more information about Mike Brady). Valone hopes to have his replication of this motor done within a month.

Other magnetic motor designs were covered such as the Hartman Patent #4,215,330, a Spiral Magnetic Motor and a flywheel vehicle power project. He referred to the June 1979 issue of Popular Science and the March 2004 issue of Aviation Week magazines.

Conclusion

Tom Valone, true to his reputation, packed his time with innovative developments in the energy field. He made the point well that there is no reason to depend so heavily on fossil fuels; from Franklin to Tesla we have had all the technology we need. With new inventions there are even fewer excuses. The travesty is the global warming we are now experiencing, because of fossil fuels, has been unnecessary.

Please visit the WONDERPLANTS blog!

2005-03-04T06:07:00.000-08:00

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You can find it here:
http://wonderplants.blogspot.com/

Link

News of another miracle plant: UNHYBRIDIZED WILD JUNGLE PEANUTS!

2005-03-03T06:11:00.000-08:00

Another miracle plant: UNHYBRIDIZED WILD JUNGLE PEANUTS!

Here is a piece of information we want to share with you:

We found the world's original ancient toxin-free peanut. WILD JUNGLE PEANUTS!The Rainforest is crazy. We couldn't believe the story about where these peanuts come from. But we promise that it's 100% true.One of our close associates works in Ecuador, sourcing and importing some really awesome raw food items for us. Recently, a friend of his invited him to visit a native local group of indigenous people. They are called the Shuar Indians.The only reason our associate even had the chance to go to their village was because his friend did something totally crazy. He participated in a sacred Shuar ritual. Since so few people are this bold - he earned their respect.Still, our associate was a little scared about the trip. The Shuars are known for their aggression. Especially toward outsiders. In fact, they are consistently battling other local tribes for control of the land.After much convincing, our friend finally decided to visit their village. When he got there, he was introduced to many of the elders, shamans (medicine men) and other villagers. He also found out that they were quite nice people, with rich traditions. Plus, they had an amazing understanding of nature.As he was getting ready to leave, some of the villagers brought him a basket with something TRULY AMAZING.HE COULDN'T BELIEVE HIS EYES.What he saw in the basket were some the most beautiful nuts he'd ever seen in his life. He didn't even know that they were peanuts at the time. They had perfectly golden-brown skin with smooth reddish stripes. Even their shape was beautiful.

AND THEN HE TASTED THEM!His first bite of these raw, wild jungle peanuts was mind-blowing. It wasn't easy for him to describe. They seemed to have a rich, "heirloom" peanut flavor and aroma. The texture was smooth and buttery - they nearly melted in his mouth. They may have been the best food he'd ever tasted."How much of these do you actually have?!" he asked. They really didn't know, but the peanuts seemed to be growing in lots of places. "Would you like to sell them? If so, I'll take 1,000 lbs. right away!" They were a little surprised, but they pooled their resources managed to harvest them, wash them and dry them in the sun. And they were happy to place their "pride and joy" in good hands.

BUT WHAT ABOUT AFLATOXIN? Our associate knew he wasn't in the clear just yet. Virtually all peanuts are known to have a mold on them called aflatoxin. So before he finalized the purchase, he sent some samples up to be tested with a company called, J. Leek & Associates. J. Leek is the top independent allergen testing facility in the United States - they work with and test for the USDA, as well as large companies like Jiffy Peanut Butter. They make sure peanut companies stay within safe ranges of aflatoxin.

NEARLY EVERYONE WAS SHOCKED BY THE RESULTS! Honestly, we all expected some amount of aflatoxin. But when the Lab Analyst from J. Leek called, he was perplexed. "Are you sure these are peanuts?" he asked. He had never seen anything like this. In four different samples, not a single one had even one part per billion of aflatoxin! That's unheard of! Even the very cleanest US peanuts have at least some aflatoxin present.When David, the guy telling this story heard the news, however, he wasn't surprised. In his books he mentions that one of the biggest problems with hybrid foods is their tendency to mold so easily (commercial peanuts are INCREDIBLY HYBRIDIZED). This peanut, on the other hand, is the ORIGINAL ANCIENT PEANUT.

It is the same peanut that existed thousands of years ago, in its most pure form. So it's not surprising that it's aflatoxin free.Further testing revealed some wonderful features of this peanut:*It contains over 40% of the beautifying oleic acid. This makes it truly "heart healthy."*It contains a whopping 26% protein! That's more than hemp or flax seeds. *It also has all 8 essential amino acids, plus some like methionine that are difficult to find in other foods.*It has the Arachidonic acid, a fatty acid typically only found in meat products.But this is just the nutrition - it's even more fun discovering what you can do with them. For example:*You could make (finally!) truly raw and totally toxin-free peanut butter and jelly! Don't you miss those days? Simply process the peanuts in your blender, juicer or food processor and put them on a raw Essene type bread or flax cracker. Then add your own homemade fresh fruit jelly (dried figs work great!) and you've got that familiar flavor you grew up with - only now it's 100 times healthier!*You can mix them with Cacao to make the best raw candies and treats ever! *You can add them to sauces, dressings, smoothies and more for an exotic, nutty flavor!*Best of all, these wild jungle peanuts are incredibly stable and taste wonderful straight out of the bag. You'll actually find it's hard to put them down.

However - THERE'S A CATCH...

One thing we didn't mention about the Shuar Indians is that their land is in jeopardy, due to the oil potential on it.Their group of approximately 4,300 Shuar people has title to roughly two million acres of primary forest. The Shuar are one of an increasing number of Amazonian indigenous groups who are organizing against oil exploration activities.

The Shuar have demanded that no oil development occur on their land, although ARCO has the exploration rights to two areas in their territory that encompass 2.5 million acres. The Shuar are putting pressure on ARCO and the Ecuadorian government to recognize their rights.But it's hard for a small group to go up against such large and monstrous companies. And this unfortunately means we don't know how long we'll be able to get these wonderful wild jungle peanuts!But the good thing is that if you buy them today, you help the Shuar to fight back. Every little bit helps, and each purchase contributes to the Shuar's sustainability. Also, the more their foods are recognized and appreciated by the US market, the more help and support they'll get from the Ecuador government, as well as non-profit groups.

We are not encouraging you to buy these peanuts right now, except as seeds to grow your own. First, they are so expensive (as a food), that only millionaires can afford them, second, the little of it there is should be reserved to raw foods people, and at that, only those rich enough to pay 20 times the going rate for US grown commercial nuts. But we are looking at how their sustainable cultivation could be organized, and destruction of the rainforest in the name of oil can be halted, providing these people with the means to resist their alien invaders. If you are interested in these issues, please contact us, and if you want to get a packet of seeds to grow some for your own consumption, we can arrange for you to get one for $19.77, shipping and handling included.

Going Bananas!

2005-03-02T16:03:00.000-08:00

Going Bananas!

By Marty Smith

Bananas are called the "world's most perfect food" in a television commercial and that holds true for the garden as well. The primary reason for giving bananas such a distinction for the garden is the very high potassium content, even in the banana skins. The banana fruit itself is normally eaten but if a couple of bananas in the bunch get too ripe to eat, that squishy, brown fruit is potassium "gold" for the garden. [Of course, this is nothing compared to the potassium content of Moringa leaves, which contain over two times more potassium than bananas, in addition to Nitrogen and Phosphorus making them a natural NPK fertilizer, but dried Moringa leaves are so precious that they sell for $40 to $50 a pound, so bananas is your best practical choice... See our post about Moringa in the "Miracle Plants" list at http://gaiathelivingplanet.blogspot.com/2005/02/wonderful-opportunity-to-showcase.html ]

More such treasure can be found in the produce department of the grocery store. No, I'm not suggesting you buy bananas at regular or even sale prices but most larger grocery stores deeply discount produce that is overly ripe, including bananas. Even bananas that are completely brown inside and out that would not be eaten are still excellent potassium fertilizer for your garden, flowerbed or container plants. I have found overly ripe bananas on the clearance rack for as little as 5 cents a pound, which is significantly cheaper than any off the shelf potassium fertilizer.

Using the bananas, fruit or peels, in the garden is easy. Personally, if I have only one peel from a banana just eaten, I simply toss the peel under the leaves of dahlias growing outside the kitchen door. The peels blacken and crumble on their own within a couple of days so they don't create an insect problem. A technique presented on a television show quite a while back involved drying the peels in the oven, set to about 180-200 degrees, any higher will destroy nutrients. In practice, the drying takes 20-30 minutes for a full cookie sheet of peels. I personally like the fragrance wafting through the house but beware, the banana peels will burn if left too long or the temperature is too high, so keep an eye on them. The peels are done and ready for the garden when they are black and still retain just a bit of moisture but crumble easily with fingers. The crumbled peels are then worked gently into the soil around the plants in your flowerbed, garden or containers. When I have a large amount of peels or overly ripe, whole bananas from the grocery, I use a blender or food processor to prepare bananas for use in the garden. Just chop up the bananas, peel and all, into one-inch chunks and liquefy small batches in a blender, adding a small amount of water if needed. When you have a pitcher full of the fragrant goo, it’s time to go out to the garden. Pouring the goo on the surface of the soil will create a smelly mess and attract unwanted insects so grab a hand trowel or cultivator. I normally use this method prior to any planting so a 3-4 inch deep trench is dug where a row of seeds will be planted and the goo is poured the length of the trench then covered over with soil. Wait a couple of days for the goo to soak in and the soil organisms to begin working before planting in that row.

Bananas are not the only produce to look for on the clearance rack, just about any vegetable or fruit will provide your compost bin or garden with valuable nutrients. Summer is the time for corn, especially in Indiana, and the ears are often shucked by the customer right there in the store so the store provides a container for the husks. Don't just walk into the store and grab the bag of husks out of the trashcan, ask a produce department employee or manager first. I've never been refused but expect them to watch or check the first couple of times that you haven't tossed a couple ears of corn into the bag. Once you have permission, don't expect the employee to do the work, take it upon yourself to pull the bag, clean up any husks on the floor and put a new bag into the container so that the favor you are asking becomes a favor to them. Other produce is often cleaned in store, such as cabbage and lettuce, before being put out for customers and those trimmings can sometime be recovered if you have developed a good relationship with the produce department manager. Another beneficial aspect of clearance produce can be as a source for seeds. Melons and squash, especially unusual varieties, often end up on the clearance rack so the seeds are easily harvested before the remainder is eaten or composted. If the grocery store you patronize is large enough to have a delicatessen department that prepares fresh fruit salad and such, ask the manager if the fruit scraps and peels can be saved for you in a sealed container that would normally be disposed of anyway. Such favors require building a relationship as a customer and you must be diligent about picking up the container perhaps even daily but the additional organic material for your compost bin or direct use is a precious commodity worth a little bit of effort.

Copyright © 2003, Marty Smith

More Quotes

2005-03-01T04:14:00.000-08:00

Here is a quite interesting one... almost word for word what we said two weeks ago:

"The Earth is a living organism. That's what the Gaia Hypothesis is all about. Imagine the cells of your body as living individual organisms. In a way, they are much like any other single celled organism except they work symbiotically to support the colony, your body. If a few are damaged then the colony may survive. But if a large portion of it is destroyed, as in a cancer, then the whole colony (you) could die. This colony is an organism, you, your whole body. Now imagine the Earth as the same thing. An organism that evolved naturally, not to support life, but to be life. We are all (all animals, plants, minerals) part of that organism called Earth and the cancer is often us. But we can also be the immune system if we take care of the Earth. The Earth, the Mother, our host organism, the one we call Gaia.

We must wake up and work to save Gaia or be destroyed ourselves. Over population, abuse of resources, and pollution will kill us all if we don't do something about it. It's not necessarily for Gaia's sake but for ours. Gaia is stronger than us. Gaia will destroy the cancer through diseases (HIV, Ebola, etc.) or the cancer will eat itself (loss of ozone, depletion of oxygen sources, over population, nuclear war, etc.). Gaia will grow again as we go the way of the dinosaurs. So we either take care of Gaia, or Gaia will take care of us! "

The website it comes from is here:
http://www.ediblebrain.com/gaia/

Interesting quotes....

2005-02-28T20:38:00.000-08:00

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is aboutcreating yourself." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Life consists not simply in what heredity andenvironment do to us but in what we make out of whatthey do to us." -- Harry Emerson Fosdick

"Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceedsfrom the achievement of one's values." -- Ayn Rand

Mutually-Beneficial Objectivism (MBO) is at the core of "mutual empowerment" -- F.A.

"Imagination is the highest kite that one can fly." -- Lauren Bacall

There's No Negative In My Program

2005-02-27T00:11:00.000-08:00

We decided to publish features articles, now and then, when we feel they could be helpful to people. Here is one, which qualifies.

This article is really a clever way for the author for promoting a book on “Niche Marketing” on the Internet, through the link at the bottom. However, since it is a quite good and uplifting article, the promotional page it leads to is also quite informative, and since there is nothing to object to what he promotes (nihil obstat, as the Church of old would have put it), as the product is reasonably-priced and excellent, and could prove quite empowering to many, here it is:

“There's No Negative In My Program”, by John Colanzi
*** FEATURE ARTICLE ***

* Imagine what you could achieve if:

* You were 100 % focused on your goal

* Eliminated all self -doubt

* Believed it were impossible to fail.

Are there really individuals who think like this?

You bet!

I saw a story the other night about two modern day cowboys.

Their real life experiences couldn't have been more amazing
if it was written by a Hollywood screen writer.

The next time I'm tempted to "suck my thumb" and have
a "pity party" I'll think of these amazing men.

The young men are brothers and champion rodeo stars.

But one day their lives were changed by an incredible
twist of fate.

The private plane they were flying in ran out of gas.
The pilot couldn't find anywhere to land safely and
they crashed.

Everyone on board had a broken back except one of the
brothers.

Battered and bruised he got out of the plane. Looking
at the wreckage he realized the plane was about to catch
fire and all the passengers inside were trapped.

Without hesitation he forgot about his own injuries,
ignored the personal risk to his life and set his mind
on the goal of saving the other passengers including his
brother.

He had:

* Focused on his goal

* Left no room for failure

* Took immediate action

The interviewer said to the young man, "You must really
feel like a hero?"

Stoically he replied, "No, I knew what I had to to do.
I don't think of myself as a hero."

Amazing!

No trash talk, no in your face, just a modest young man
focused on what needed to be done.

If you think he's amazing, wait until you hear about his
brother....

Well you know about the young hero who saved his brother,
but that was just the beginning of the incredible feats
of these young men.

His younger brother arrived at the hospital with a broken
back. The doctors told him he would never be able to
compete again.

The interviewer asked the young man, "What did it feel
like when the doctors told you you'd never be able to ride
again?"

Without a second thought he replied, "I don't think I
really heard what they said." "There's no negative in my
program."

When I heard that I couldn't believe it.

Here's a champion athlete with a broken back and his
only comment is "There's no negative in my program."

Wow!

I wish I could think like that.

Was he in denial, was he crazy, no way.

Instead of cursing circumstance, crying poor me, he set
a goal and never looked back.

As soon as he was able, he began 4 hours a day of
rehabilitation.

When commenting on the pain he said, "My only focus was
on what I needed to do to remove the pain."

Low and behold after 16 months of:

* Being 100 % focused on his goal

* Believing it was impossible to fail.

The two brothers are rodeo stars again.

All because "There is no negative in their programs."

Imagine what you could achieve with just half the
determination of these modern day cowboys.

Maybe Willie Nelson knows what he's talking about when
he sings "My heroes have always been cowboys."

Wishing You Success,
John Colanzi

****************************************
Copyright (c) John Colanzi.

http://hop.clickbank.net/?netbiztuls/johncolanz

POISONS IN OUR FOOD: DON’T BE A FOOL ANY LONGER!

2005-02-24T02:48:00.000-08:00

POISONS IN OUR FOOD

EVEN MAINSTREAM PRESS NOW ADMITS TO IT!

It’s not very clear how the powers-that-be managed to let the following piece of info reach the public, but here it is, in all its splendor, and straight from the mouth of the horse: The food you eat, the water you drink, are poisoned. Poisoned in many ways, sometimes voluntarily (such as with water fluoridation and with aspartame, but also in ways you have no ideas of, such as the one you are going to read about. And, now and then, as is the case here, even the monopoly press has to admit to it!

What comes out of this article is that what average consumers eat and drink is so poisoned, that, in fact, it threatens to destroy the brain of babies, when passing through the milk of their mothers!

And perchlorate is just nothing, compared to aspartame, fluoride, terminator seeds, synthetic hormones, herbicides and pesticides, “Genetically-Modified Organisms” also known as GMOs and “frankenfoods”, and other “partially hydrogenated” goodies! As twice Nobel Laureate, Dr Otto Warburg, put it, you are a fool if you eat anything not grown or by yourself, or by people you know, and can trust!

If you want to know more, and why, you could start with reading “The Cancer Cause - Cancer causes and cofactors: What is causing CANCER?” This article contains numerous quotes by Professor Warburg, from "On The Origin of Cancer Cells," SCIENCE, (24FEB1956), Volume 123, Number 3191, pp. 309-314. It can be found here: http://curezone.com/diseases/cancer/cancercause.html .

Dr Otto Warburg wrote, for example, "On The Origin of Cancer Cells," which can be found in SCIENCE, (24 Feb1956), Volume 123, Number 3191, pp. 309-314. He was then the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Cell Physiology, Berlin-Dahlem, Germany. This article is based on a lecture delivered at Stuttgart on 25 May 1955 before the German Central Committee for Cancer Control. It was first published in German [Naturwissenschaften 42, 401 (1955)]. The English translation was prepared by Dean Burk, Jehu Hunter, and W. H. Everhardy of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., with permission of Naturwissenschaften and with collaboration of Professor Warburg, who introduced additional material. Dr Warburg demonstrated that “The first phase of tumor development is initiation. It occurs when cell's genetic makeup get altered, enabling it to divide more freely than it should. DNA can be damaged by: - Radiation - Viruses - Free radicals but mainly: - Chemicals” (Carcinogens - there is more than 500 + known carcinogens today. Many of them are in our food, water and other products that we are using every day).

Dr Warburg warned that unless we as a society change the way we eat, the number of cancers would skyrocket. Indeed, when Dr Warburg warned the powers-that-be and the public, about 1 in 6 or 7 people were going to get cancer in their lifetime in the USA, already up from 1 in 25 or 30 at the beginning of the XXth Century. Today, 50 years later, it is OVER 50%. You have MORE THAN ONE CHANCE IN TWO TO GET CANCER IN YOUR LIFETIME! As for children born right now, their chances are probably already over 90%. Additions to their diets such as perchlorates will do the trick.

[The following copyrighted article is hereby reproduced for non-commercial informational purposes under USC Title 17]:

“Rocket-Fuel Chemical Found in Breast Milk”, By Marla Con, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, Wed. Feb. 23, 2005. [All emphasis by our staff).

Scientists on Tuesday reported that perchlorate, a toxic component of rocket fuel, was contaminating virtually all samples of women's breast milk and its levels were found to be, on average, five times greater than in cow's milk.

The contaminant, which originates mostly at defense industry plants, previously had been detected in various food and water supplies around the country. But the study by Texas Tech University's Institute of Environmental and Human Health was the first to investigate breast milk.

The findings concern health experts because infants and fetuses are the most vulnerable to the thyroid-impairing effects of the chemical.
Breast milk from 36 women in 18 states, including California, was sampled, and all contained traces of perchlorate.

Perchlorate blocks the nutrient iodide and inhibits thyroid hormones, which are necessary for brain development and cellular growth of a fetus or infant. A baby with impaired thyroid development may have neurological defects that result in lower IQ or learning disabilities.

The researchers recommended that pregnant and nursing women block the effects of perchlorate by taking iodine supplements as a precaution.
At the levels they found in breast milk, the scientists reported that 1-month-old infants would take in enough perchlorate to exceed a safe level, called a reference dose, that was established last month by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It is obvious that the NAS safe dose … will be exceeded for the majority of infants," the report published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology says. Some infants would ingest so much that they would exceed levels that altered the brain structure of animals in laboratory tests.

The findings come as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is developing an enforceable limit on the amount of perchlorate in drinking water based on the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences panel. Currently there is no national standard.

"This is not just another study," said Renee Sharp, a senior analyst at the Environmental Working Group, which advocated a strict national standard. "It ends the questions about whether women are passing along perchlorate to their kids through breast milk, and the sky-high levels the scientists found put more than half the kids over the safe levels the NAS now recommends."

Environmentalists have urged the EPA to set its standard based on the body weight and perchlorate intake of an infant rather than an adult. Toxicologists said that would probably mean a standard of a few parts per billion. Pentagon officials have said that would shut down many water systems across the country and cost the military and its contractors billions of dollars in cleanup costs. They have instead lobbied for a standard of about 200 parts per billion based on thyroid studies of adults.

The new findings "will practically force EPA officials to write a drinking water standard that protects infants — not just healthy adults," Sharp said.

California has set its own public health goal of 6 parts per billion but it is not an enforceable limit.

The Texas Tech researchers, led by Andrea Kirk, reported that the perchlorate in breast milk was not linked to the water the mothers drank. Instead, the main source was probably food, which apparently was tainted by irrigation water.

The finding that perchlorate is pervasive in breast milk and reaches high levels is somewhat of a surprise to toxicologists, because, unlike many other industrial chemicals, it does not build up in tissues over time.
Instead, it appears that the amount passed on to the infant in breast milk is determined by what the mother has just eaten.

Perchlorate levels are particularly high in the lower Colorado River, which supplies irrigation water to almost 2 million acres of cropland. The river, government officials believe, has been tainted by leaks from a Kerr-McGee plant near Lake Mead.

The highest perchlorate levels, one reaching 92 parts per billion, were found in the breast milk of two women from New Jersey. The average was 10.5 parts per billion, compared to 2 parts per billion in cow's milk. Forty-six of 47 samples of dairy milk purchased in 11 states, including California, contained perchlorate.

Sujatha Jahagirdar, clean-water advocate at Environment California, an advocacy group, said it was "absolutely appalling" that a component of rocket fuel was found in mother's milk.” We sure agree with him!

And here is what Dr Budwig, a six time Nobel Award nominated doctor (but the powers-that-be each time made sure she did not get the actual prize) had to say about Gaia Ecology, and the influence of what we do, what we eat and what we drink: "Every interference or intervention which disturbs man's biological-dynamic balance, his place in the cosmic scheme of things, in the dipolar field current of Electro-magnetic powers which surrounds the world, and its creatures, and which govern the entire cosmos, every interference with the far reaching relationships, promotes the disease of cancer." -Johanna Budwig, Ph.D. See more about her at http://curezone.com/diseases/cancer/cancer_dr_budwig.asp .

IN A NUTSHELL: DON’T BE A FOOL ANY LONGER!

Do like Dr Otto Warburg did, and GROW YOUR OWN FOOD, in well-prepared soil rich in humus and compost, OR PARTICIPATE in a “Community-Supported Agriculture” scheme with people you can trust!

Not only your life, but the life and well-being of your children as well may depend on it!

ANNOUNCING the "GAIA CORPS OF ENGINEERS"

2005-02-23T08:23:00.000-08:00

ANNOUNCING the "GAIA CORPS OF ENGINEERS"

The idea is simple: If we ever want to save the planet, and in the process, save ourselves, we need to think differently, outside of the frames of ordinary thought, and do bold things.

Here is a history of the model concept, that is, where our name for this endeavor comes from:
http://www.terrypepper.com/lights/closeups/armycorps/armycorps.htm

Of course, We, the Peoples, do not have the resources of any aspects of the powers-that-be.

However, the powers-that-be have proved incapable of doing much good, and very capable of doing much harm. They prove the point every day, day after day. Therefore, the task of changing our lives, and, in a way "Change Life Itself" (SM), can only be assumed by those who reached the necessary level of consciousness and awareness.

And that, perhaps, means... YOU!

Bookmark this post, it will be constantly updated!

You are here at:
http://savegaia.blogspot.com/2005/02/announcing-gaia-corps-of-engineers.html

COMPOST TEAS - AN OLD SECRET TO LET YOUR GARDEN EXPLODE...

2005-02-22T02:10:00.000-08:00

THE SECRETS OF COMPOST TEAS

COMPOST TEA? WHY IS IT GOOD FOR YOUR GARDEN OR FARM?

Compost tea is ancient. You can find references to it in texts dating back to the Roman Empire (Cato's De Agricultura). So says a real doyenne of dirt, microbial ecologist Elaine Ingham, who wrote this to Ketzel Levine in a recent e-mail:

(Cato the Critic) describes a liquid extract of compost. He also describes adding slaves' blood to the liquid applied to the vines. We would add liquid fish today to get a similar effect.
In the 20th century, compost tea makers preferred the Sock Approach. The recipe went something like this: Fill old sock with compost or manure, immerse sock in pail of water, let steep. When color is sufficiently brown, apply to plants.

But that's way too simple for the 21st century. We now take a more microbially balanced view of things (and, wouldn't you know it, a more marketable one). The Sock Approach, after all, left many with nasty-smelling brews that contained as much bad bacteria as good. So, folks in the field applied themselves to compost tea mixes with just the right combination of microorganisms.

As Elaine Ingham puts it, "Tea works because of the biology in it. If you don't have the necessary biology, you can't get all the benefits."

The benefits are well worth the effort, advocates say. We're talking pest and disease control on leaves (compost tea as foliar spray), bigger and better vegetables (compost tea as muscle juice), compost tea for soil detoxification (to undo the damage you've already done with chemical-based pesticides and synthetic fertilizers), and ultimately, for enhancing soil structure.

Few would argue against the wisdom of adding yummy bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes to the soil. Certainly, compost tea is one way to add them.

But Elaine Ingham does argue that there are charlatans in the biz.

Without naming names, she's not entirely thrilled with some of the commercial brewing kits on the market. She says the tea they make lacks the right mix of microorganisms, and are ineffective. She fears that people will abandon the whole idea of compost tea after sinking time and money into products that are duds.

I brewed up about six gallons of compost tea using the SoilSoup brew machine. I applied several cups of the stuff to strategic plants throughout my garden. I don't expect to see much of anything happen until next spring, and even then, since my soil isn't exactly dust to begin with, I'm not sure I'll see much of a difference.

Nevertheless, I have had my fair share of foliar diseases this year and just a few too many pests, so I'm willing to overcome my general reluctance to intervene (read: lazy gardener), and will continue to experiment with the brewer. No doubt, after the dew-good fades, I'll probably go buy some organic pre-mix and just follow directions. Bottom line, however good it is for me, I've always hated to cook.

Additional Resources:

SoilSoup is the manufacturer of the compost brewer we used in our demonstration. They offer a pretty lively (if decidedly commercial) Web site with useful links.

The Soil Food Web is the brainchild of microbial ecologist Elaine Ingham, author of The Compost Tea Brewing Manual (3rd Edition). You could dawdle here for hours. Skeptics rejoice, she is no-nonsense about her field, as evidenced by her reviews of microbe-brewers.

BBC Laboratories is another micronutrient-rich site and research lab. Love their summary guide for microbial analysis; amaze and impress your friends.

Woods End Research Laboratory is the oldest compost testing lab in the U.S. Stop here to learn about using compost to detoxify soil (a.k.a., bioremediation).

In the best name category, the makers of the Microb Brewer win hands down. Good links page, too.

Brewmeisters
Some of these links are a bit beyond the casual home-brewer and cater to professionals, but are worth visiting if you're interested in sustainable agriculture.

Alaska Giant: The slideshow will make you a little nuts, but John & Mary Evans clearly mean well with their mail-order compost kits for the home gardener. You can sample their brew at Landscape Supply in Palmer, Alaska. Honest!

Compost Tea: EPM Inc. manufactures both compost tea brewers and vermicomposting systems (remember the worms?).

Growing Solutions, Inc., another brewmaker. Need a 500-gallon tank?

Earthworks wins the good deed award for selling compost tea machines to dozens of U.S. golf courses. Feed your head? Way dated. Now it's Feed Your Soil.

If you've made it this far, here are a couple of articles:
Linda Chalker-Scott, from the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, weighs in on the myths of compost tea.

Homemade compost tea instructions from Organic Gardening.
Here's a succinct article by Elaine Ingham about compost tea, published in the (now defunct) Kitchen Gardener.

[If you want to know more about compost tea, just visit Ketzel Levine's page at: http://www.npr.org/programs/talkingplants/features/2002/compost/ who compiled this information]

More on Compost - II

2005-02-21T23:39:00.001-08:00

(Coming)

More on Compost - II

2005-02-21T23:39:00.000-08:00

(Coming)

More on Compost - III - INTRODUCTION TO BIOCOMPOSTS & BIO-DYNAMIC COMPOSTS

2005-02-21T23:33:00.000-08:00

YOUR INTRODUCTION TO BIOCOMPOSTS & BIO-DYNAMIC COMPOSTS

What is compost?

Composting is a way to give back to the earth what it gave us, and to recycle organic materials into "The Health and Wealth of the Earth: Humus", as the great soil specialist of last century, Andre Birre, put it -- This was the title of his seminal book.

What is bio-dynamic compost?

Biodynamic compost is a compost made according to bio-dynamic specifications. It is a fundamental component of the biodynamic method; serves as a way to recycle animal manures and organic wastes; stabilize nitrogen; and build soil humus and enhance soil health. Biodynamic compost is unique because it is made according to very precise specifications. See our articles "More on Compost".

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike." - John Muir

People asked...
WHO IS JACK McANDREW, THE LOS ANGELES BIODYNAMIC COMPOST MAGICIAN?

Dr Maria C. Linder, Professor of Biochemistry at CalState Fullerton, once wrote about him: "Composting is not something one can pick up overnight and really do well. It takes years to get real expertise... Bio-dynamic composting is more scientifically based than most and is by far the most impressive method I have encountered. Jack has studied the process for many years, and with the best Masters in the business." [Only one of them, Peter Dukich, is still alive, and flirting with becoming a centenarian.]

Professor Linder added: "At this time, there are very few people in the country with [Jack] experience and expertise." In fact, Dr Annenberg once said that "Jack is the only remaining Living Master in biocomposting, besides Peter Dukich."

But truth is that Professor Linder herself is in fact a renowned expert in the field. However, she did not focus her entire business career on producing the most amazing composts, like Jack did...
[Visit his wenpage at www.biodynamiccompost.com ]

*****

A WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY TO SHOWCASE TRULY ORGANIC
AND BIO-DYNAMIC SUSTAINABLE FARMING & GARDENING
http://www.biodynamiccompost.com/ has partnered with http://www.savegaia.com/ to bring you the most advanced organic biodynamic compost there is as part of a pilot project in "miracle plants cultivation". http://www.savegaia.com/ needs land for its new model facility. See our other post about that.

*****

NEW: A newsgroup dedicated to SAVING GAIA, our common Mother Planet, and SAVING OURSELVES IN THE PROCESS, Homepage: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/savegaia

MORE ON SPECIAL BIODYNAMIC COMPOSTS

2005-02-19T23:09:00.000-08:00

SPECIAL BIODYNAMIC COMPOSTS

To give you an idea of the complexity of the preparation of biodynamic compost, and how incredible results you can get with it, you could look at the following webpages: http://www.maadmob.net/house/compost/ (fully illustrated)
http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/biodynamic.html#compost

Here is an excerpt from that site: Biodynamic Compost: Biodynamic compost is a fundamental component of the biodynamic method; it serves as a way to recycle animal manures and organic wastes, stabilize nitrogen, and build soil humus and enhance soil health. Biodynamic compost is unique because it is made with BD preparations 502-507. Together, the BD preparations and BD compost may be considered the cornerstone of biodynamics. Here again, "biological" and "dynamic" qualities are complementary: biodynamic compost serves as a source of humus in managing soil health and biodynamic compost emanates energetic frequencies to vitalize the farm.The traditional manner in which the biodynamic compost is made is rather exacting. After the compost windrow is constructed, Preparations 502-506 are strategically placed 5-7 feet apart inside the pile, in holes poked about 20 inches deep. Preparation No. 507, or liquid valerian, is applied to the outside layer of the compost windrow by spraying or hand watering.Figure 1. Use of Biodynamic Preparations in a Compost PileValerian (507) is mixed into a liquid; a portion is pored into one hole, and the rest is sprinkled over the top of the compost pile.More specific instructions on biodynamic preparations, placement in the compost, compost making, and compost use can be found in the following booklets, available through the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association (BDFGA) in San Francisco, California:Blaser, Peter, and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. 1984.

Bio-Dynamic Composting on the Farm: How Much Compost Should We Use? Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, Inc., Kimberton, PA. 23p.Corrin, George. 1960. Handbook on Composting and the Bio-Dynamic Preparations. Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Association, London. 32 p.Koepf, H.H. 1980. Compost - What It Is, How It Is Made, What It Does. Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, Inc., Kimberton, PA. 18 p.Pfeiffer, Ehrenfried. 1984. Using the Bio-Dynamic Compost Preparations & Sprays in Garden, Orchard, & Farm. Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening Association, Inc., Kimberton, PA. 64 p.

Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer (1899-1961), a soil microbiologist and agronomic researcher who worked directly with Steiner, conducted extensive research on the preparation and use of biodynamic compost. For many years Pfeiffer served as a compost consultant to municipal compost facilities, most notably Oakland, CA, as well as countries in the Caribbean, Europe, and the Far East.

Pfeiffer's research into the microbiology of compost production led to the development of a compost inoculant, BD Compost Starter®, that contains all the BD compost preparations (502-507) plus stirred BD No. 500, as well as 55 different types of microorganisms (mixed cultures of bacteria, fungi, actinomycetes, yeasts). BD Compost Starter® is widely used by biodynamic farmers because it is easy to apply while building the compost pile. Today, the starter is prepared and sold through the Josephine Porter Institute (JPI) for Applied Biodynamics (5) in Woolwine, Virginia.While use of BD compost preparations and/or BD Compost Starter® is universal in biodynamic composting, the actual construction and maintenance of compost piles — including frequency of aeration and length till maturity — may vary among farming operations.

The static pile method is the traditional biodynamic choice: In static piles materials are formed into a windrow, inoculated with BD preparations, covered with straw, and left undisturbed for 6 months to one year prior to use. A small amount of soil is commonly sprinkled onto the outside of the pile prior to covering with straw. Soil can also be added during the windrow construction process, when brown (carbon) and green (nitrogen) feedstock materials are laid in alternating layers.On larger farms that handle massive volumes of compost feedstock, the piles are often managed with a compost turner, so the time to maturity is much shorter, for example 2-3 months.

A new development is the aerated static pile (ASP), wherein ventilation pipes are inserted into a static pile to increase oxygen supply and reduce the length of time to compost biomaturity.Contrasting viewpoints exist in the compost industry as well as amongst on-farm compost makers as to which method is best. When push comes to shove, most people agree that the best compost method is one that fits the individual farmer's situation.Recent biodynamic research supports the static pile approach as a viable compost option. In the July-August 1997 issue of Biodynamics , Dr. William Brinton of Woods End Agricultural Research Institute published "Sustainability of Modern Composting: Intensification Versus Costs and Quality. " Brinton argues that low-tech composting methods are just as effective in stabilizing nutrients and managing humus as the management and capital intensive compost systems that employ compost turners and daily monitoring. These findings are particularly encouraging to farmers choosing the low-input approach to this age-old practice of transforming organic matter into valuable humus. The full report can be viewed on Woods End Institute's website at: <http://www.woodsend.org/sustain.pdf>.

At the other end of the compost spectrum are the high intensity windrow systems — for example the Controlled Microbial Composting system promoted by the Siegfried Luebke family of Austria and the Advanced Compost System promoted by Edwin Blosser of Midwestern Biosystems in Illinois — that emphasize specialized compost turners, microbial inoculation, frequent turning, daily monitoring for temperature and CO2, compost fleece to cover and protect the windrow, and qualitative testing for finished compost. In addition to efficient handling of organic wastes, premium-grade compost is a goal.It should be noted these highly mechanized systems seem to fit operations that generate large volumes of animal manures or other compost feedstocks, such as a dairy farm or food processing plant. On-farm production of compost is often matched with sale of bagged or bulk compost to local horticultural operations as a supplemental income.

Ultimately, the choice of composting method will depend to a large extent on the scale of farming operation, equipment and financial resources on hand, and intended goals for compost end-use.Research at Washington State University (WSU) by Dr. Lynn Carpenter-Boggs and Dr. John Reaganold found that biodynamic compost preparations have a significant effect on compost and the composting process.Biodynamically treated composts had higher temperatures, matured faster, and had higher nitrates than control compost piles inoculated with field soil instead of the preparations. The WSU research is unique for two reasons: it was the first biodynamic compost research undertaken at a land-grant university, and it demonstrated that biodynamic preparations are not only effective, but effective in homeopathic quantities.

A summary of this research can be found on the USDA-Agriculture Research Service's Tektran Website at: Effects of Biodynamic Preparations on Compost Development http://www.nal.usda.gov/ttic/tektran/data/000009/06/0000090623.html
In related research, Carpenter-Boggs and Reaganold found that biodynamically managed soils (i.e., treated with biodynamic compost and biodynamic field sprays) had greater capacity to support heterotrophic microflora activity, higher soil microorganism activity, and different types of soil microrganisms than conventionally managed soils (i.e., treated with mineral fertilizers and pesticides).

A summary of this latter research can be found on the USDA-Agriculture Research Service's Tektran Website at:Biodynamic Compost and Field Preparations: Effects on Soil Biological Community http://www.nal.usda.gov/ttic/tektran/data/000009/06/0000090640.html
Because compost is often at a premium on farms, European biodynamic researcher Maria Thun developed Barrel Compost. Consisting of fresh cow manure that has been treated with the original preparations as well as egg shells and basalt rock dust — then allowed to ferment in a pit for about 3 months, finished Barrel Compost is diluted in water and applied directly to the fields as a spray. Use of Barrel Compost compensates to some degree for lack of sufficient compost. A variation on Barrel Compost is mixing stinging nettle with fresh cow manure in a 50:50 volume to volume ratio.Some notable concepts and practices relating to soil and compost management from the biodynamic experience.

Microbial inoculation: Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer's work with composts in the 1940's and 50's led to the development of the BD Compost Starter®, one of the earliest compost inoculants in commercial use in the United States.Soil in Compost: The addition of soil to compost was an early biodynamic practice prescribed by Steiner. Dr. Pfeiffer discussed the reasons and benefits for adding soils to compost in the 1954 edition of Bio-Dynamics Journal (Vol. 12, No. 2) in an article titled "Raw Materials Useful for Composting." He said that soil is an essential ingredient to compost and should be added at 10%-20% of the windrow volume.Mineralized Compost: The addition of rock powders (greensand, granite dust) to compost piles is a long-time biodynamic practice known as mineralized compost. The dusts add mineral components to the compost and the organic acids released during the decomposition process help solubilize minerals in the rock powders to make nutrients more available to plants.

Phases of Compost: An outgrowth of Dr. Pfeiffer's compost research was a clearer understanding of the Breakdown and Buildup compost phases:The Breakdown Phase: In the breakdown phase organic residues are decomposed into smaller particles. Proteins are broken down into amino acids, amines, and finally to ammonia, nitrates, nitrites, and free nitrogen. Urea, uric acids, and other non-protein nitrogen-containing compunds are reduced to ammonia, nitrites, nitrates, and free nitrogen. Carbon compounds are oxidized to carbon dioxide (aerobic) or reduced methane (anaerobic).The identification and understanding of breakdown microorganisms led to the development of a microbial inoculant to moderate and speed up the breakdown phase. The BD Compost Starter® developed by Dr. Pfeiffer contains a balanced mixture of the most favorable breakdown organisms, ammonifiers, nitrate formers, cellulose, sugar, and starch digesters in order to bring about the desired results. The microbial inoculant also works against organisms that cause putrefaction and odors.

The Buildup Phase: In the build-up phase simple compounds are re-synthesized into complex humic substances. The organisms responsible for transformation to humus are aerobic and facultative aerobic, sporing and non-sporing and nitrogen fixing bacteria of the azotobacter and nitrosomonas group. Actinomycetes and streptomycetes also play an important role. The addition of soil, 10% by volume, favors the development and survival of these latter organisms. The development of humus is evident in color changes in the compost, and through qualitative tests such as the circular chromatography method.Compost & Soil Evaluation: Biodynamic research into compost preparation and soil humus conditions has led to the development or specialized use of several unique qualitative tests.A notable contribution of biodynamics is the image-forming qualitative methods of analysis; e.g., circular chromatography, sensitive crystallization, capillary dynamolysis, and the drop-picture method. Other methods focus on the biological-chemical condition; e.g., The Solvita® Compost Test Kit and The Solvita® Soil Test Kit (8), colorimetric humus value, and potential pH.

EFFICIENT LOW-COST NATURAL HILL & LANDSLIDE MANAGEMENT THROUGH TERRACING & OPTIMAL REFORESTATION AND VEGETATION MANAGEMENT

2005-02-18T02:31:00.000-08:00

EFFICIENT LOW-COST
NATURAL HILL & LANDSLIDE MANAGEMENT
THROUGH TERRACING & OPTIMAL REFORESTATION AND VEGETATION MANAGEMENT

A TIMELY ISSUE: Climate changes, particularly in areas such as California, are in the process of making the issue of EFFICIENT LOW-COST HILL & LANDSLIDE MANAGEMENT a very timely one, and this should prove more and more true in the years to come. Despite this, mainly for lack of understanding of the dynamics at hand, very little expertise is offered on the subject, and even less in form of integrated efficient solutions.

Common sense indicates that the vegetation used for hill and landslide management must offer a certain number of characteristics such as:
Good general adaptability and drought resistance.
Adaptation to specific local climates.
Capability to grow at very high rates, and particularly, to develop long and solid taproots, even in dense plantations.
Good relative resistance to fire.
Tolerance of coppicing in relation to potential fire hazards [Coppicing is the practice of clear-cutting to soil level trees capable of growing again from their roots -- ideally as if nothing had happened at all.].
Low maintenance.
Potential for profitability or at least no-cost management.

AN ENORMOUS POTENTIAL MARKET: If you still doubt that landslides are a global problem, and consequently, a vast and very promising global market for innovative and efficient low-cost long-term solutions, please consult List of Current Landslide Related News, at http://sts.gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/landslides/index_e.asp?CaId=7&PgId=11

A CALL FOR GRANTS & FINANCIAL PARTNERSHIPS: Careful research allowed us to identify several tree species offering all of the above characteristics, and to define a business model, which could allow offering specific cultivars and clones as well as related services in what we believe to be a potentially very profitable manner.

To prepare a comprehensive business plan as well as conduct small scale experiments as well as perhaps one medium-scale proof of concept implementation, we need approximately $100K to $250K, which could be provided or as grants, or as “seed investment” by “angel investors”.

At the same time, we will try to identify communities or properties faced with acute landslide problems, and negotiate with them small local contracts to be used as models for wide-scale implementations of the different models we are currently researching.

For more information: mailto:hillmanagement@savegaia.com

© 2005 NOSEPRAS Foundation & SORAS Trust. All rights reserved worldwide.

MANAGING THE HUMAN ENVIRONMENT: HILLSIDE MANAGEMENT AWARENESS

2005-02-18T02:28:00.000-08:00

MANAGING THE HUMAN ENVIRONMENT: HILLSIDE MANAGEMENT AWARENESS

Fortunately, awareness of such issues has increased in the past years. For example, the National Institute of Building Sciences writes in “Resist Natural Hazards, by the WBDG Safe Committee”, http://www.wbdg.org/design/resist_hazards.php :

Buildings in any geographic location are subject to a wide variety of natural phenomena such as windstorms, floods and landslides, earthquakes, and other hazards. While the occurrence of these events cannot be precisely predicted, their impacts are well understood and can be managed effectively through a comprehensive program of hazard mitigation planning. Mitigation refers to measures that can reduce or eliminate the vulnerability of the built environment to hazards, whether natural or man-made.

Only after the overall risk is fully understood should mitigation measures be identified, prioritized, and implemented. Basic principles underlying this process include:

The impacts of natural hazards and the costs of the disasters they cause will be reduced whether mitigation measures are implemented pre-disaster (preventively) or post-disaster (correctively). Proactively integrating mitigation measures into new construction is always more economically feasible than retrofitting existing structures. (…)

All mitigation is local. Most mitigation measures, whether structural or regulatory, fall under the jurisdiction of local government. Additionally, mitigation initiatives are most effective when they involve the full participation of local stakeholders.

In http://www.wbdg.org/design/balancing_objectives.php?r=resist_hazards they add:

Synergies:

Erosion Control Measures: The erosion of soil caused by precipitation or wind can lead to destruction of vegetation, degradation of property, and sedimentation of local water bodies as well as unstable building foundations and potential loss of structural integrity. Erosion control measures can be implemented to stabilize the soil (e.g., seeding and mulching, installing pervious paving) and/or to retain sediment after erosion had occurred (e.g., earth dikes and sediment basins). These help to reduce the negative impacts on water and air quality as well as mitigate potential damage to a building's foundation and structural system due to floods, mudslides, torrential rainstorms, and other natural hazards.

Landscaping: Keeping sustainability and safety goals in mind, designers can create landscaping schemes that can at once reduce environmental impacts and deter crime. For example, landscaping elements such as retention ponds and berms can be used to control erosion, manage storm water, and reduce heat islands while also serving as physical barriers to control access to a building and to deflect the effects of a blast. Native or climate tolerant trees can help to improve the quality of the site as well as provide protection by obscuring assets and people.

In fact, they even call for sustainability and advocate “an integrated, synergistic approach that considers all phases of the facility life cycle.

This "sustainable" approach supports an increased commitment to environmental stewardship and conservation, and results in an optimal balance of cost, environmental, societal, and human benefits while meeting the mission and function of the intended facility or infrastructure.” See http://www.wbdg.org/design/sustainable.php .
For more information: mailto:hillmanagement@savegaia.com

© 2005 NOSEPRAS Foundation & SORAS Trust. All rights reserved worldwide.

MANAGING THE HUMAN ENVIRONMENT: HILLSIDE MANAGEMENT

2005-02-18T02:24:00.000-08:00

MANAGING THE HUMAN ENVIRONMENT: HILLSIDE MANAGEMENT

What is a Mudslide? A hillside shifts sending mud, rocks and trees rumbling down its slope. Homes and property are buried or swept away. People are left homeless, injured or even killed. Worldwide, thousands of people die every year from land and mudslides. In the United Sates alone, land and mudslides cause an estimated [$2 billion] in damage and kill 25 to 50 people every year. [It will be a lot more than that from 2005 onward…] http://www.disasterrelief.org/Disasters/971008landslide/

Mudslides: Mudslides often occur because the natural vegetation has been removed from steep slopes, which, in addition, have rarely been terraced. When there is a lot of rainfall in a short period of time, the soil layer becomes unstable and slides down the sides of mountains. Mudslides are also common along coastal areas… http://www.rocksforkids.com/RFK/Naturaldisasters.html

Solution? Natural Hillside & Landslide Control through Terracing & Vegetation Management:

"We should learn from disaster, the laws of nature cannot be tampered with.” Adi Susmianto, Conservation Director of the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry's regional and Forest Conservation Directorate General, about a mudslide that killed several hundred people, and the solutions to the problem. This solution is as valid in Malibu, California, as it is in Indonesia.

-***-

According to the U.S. Government (FEMA, www.fema.gov/rrr/talkdiz/landslide.shtm ), landslides are a serious geologic hazard common to almost every state in the United States. It is estimated that nationally they cause up to $2 billion in damages and from 25 to 50 deaths annually. Globally, landslides cause billions of dollars in damage and thousands of deaths and injuries each year. Individuals [and communities] can take steps to reduce their personal risk.

Some landslides move slowly and cause damage gradually, whereas others move so rapidly that they can destroy property and take lives suddenly and unexpectedly. Gravity is the force driving landslide movement. Factors that allow the force of gravity to overcome the resistance of earth material to landslide movement include: saturation by water, steepening of slopes by erosion or construction, alternate freezing or thawing, earthquake shaking, and volcanic eruptions.

Climate changes will make landslides more and more common, unless their underlying causes are properly addressed.

The true cause of landslides: Landslides are typically associated with periods of heavy rainfall or rapid snow melt and tend to worsen the effects of flooding that often accompanies these events. In areas burned by forest and brush fires, a lower threshold of precipitation may initiate landslides.

Wildfires can also lead to destructive debris-flow activity. In July 1994, a severe wildfire swept Storm King Mountain, west of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, denuding the slopes of vegetation. Heavy rains on the mountain in September resulted in numerous debris flows…

Here is the main point to understand: Landslides, mudslides, and the like, are not “Acts of God”. 90% of these types of problem have a very human origin. Basically, this is a problem of vegetation, or rather, lack thereof, or lack of optimal vegetation: Entirely a human-created problem.

Consequently, the most efficient way to address these problems and ward them off is proper reforestation and vegetation management. This is particularly true in heavily populated areas. To make it short, except in the case of major earthquakes, landslides are not truly a geological problem, but mainly a manmade environmental problem. Worse, with zoning laws and such, they are often also a governmental problem as well, meaning here that government regulations and activity can be one the causes of the problem, rather than a contributor of solutions. About this, see http://www.mekonginfo.org/mrc_en/announce.nsf/0/4dd7202af007d53247256e67003a44f4?OpenDocument which shows that "However much we would wish to think of these as strictly natural disasters, human activities play a significant role in increasing risk and vulnerability.” As the United Nations themselves say in “The human role in natural disasters” at http://www.undp.org.vn/mlist/envirovlc/032004/post120.htm , “Improved management of ecosystems can save lives”. And not only the lives of some far-away people you might care little about, but your life, the life of your family, the life of your neighbors. To say nothing about loss of property, and potential numerous other inconveniences.

All this means that, in practice, the principal cause of landslides is deforestation and destruction of vegetal cover, usually the consequence of past or present human activity. If human activity is the main cause of landslides, reason compels to consider that reversing the effects of this activity is probably the best way of reversing the unwanted consequence of it: Landslides. Which is, in fact, proves exactly true in the vast majority of cases.

Awareness Information: Areas that are generally prone to landslide hazards include existing old landslides; the bases of steep slopes; the bases of drainage channels; and developed hillsides where leach-field septic systems are used. Areas that are typically considered safe from landslides include areas that have not moved in the past; relatively flat-lying areas away from sudden changes in slope; and areas at the top or along ridges, set back from the tops of slopes.

Learn what to watch for prior to major landsliding. Look for patterns of storm-water drainage on slopes near your home, noting especially the places where runoff water converges, increasing flow over soil-covered slopes. Check hillsides around your home for any signs of land movement, such as small landslides or debris flows or progressively tilting trees.

Landslides occur where they have before, and in identifiable hazard locations. Ask for information on landslides in your area, specific information on areas vulnerable to landslides, and request a professional referral for a very detailed site analysis of your property, and corrective measures you can take, if necessary.

Be aware that your interests might be different from what benefits vested interests and the powers that be: “Evidence is presented to show that there is a growing disparity between the public perception and the scientific evidence relating to the causes of floods and landslides, their impacts and the benefits of mitigation measures. It is suggested that this disparity has arisen through the extensive promotion of certain land uses and engineering interventions by vested interest groups in the absence of any effective dissemination of the scientific evidence, which may allow a contrary view. It is recognized that the interaction of floods and society is a highly complex subject: Floods and landslides may have both natural and anthropogenic causes...” [Quoted from Ian R Calder, Bruce Aylward and Russell A LaFayette - CLUWRR, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK & USDA Forest Service, Milwaukee, WI, USA]

How to Protect Your Community and Your Property:
If your property is in a landslide-prone area, contract with a private consulting company specializing in earth movement for opinions and advice on landslide problems and on corrective measures you can take. Such companies would likely be those specializing in geotechnical engineering, structural engineering, or civil engineering. Local officials could possibly advise you as to the best kind of professional to contact in your area. Taking steps without consulting a professional could make your situation worse. However, be aware that “allopathic” remedies, such as lots of concrete, and the like, might be a lot more costly than “oriental medicine” and natural remedies – that is, vegetation.

Install flexible pipefittings to avoid gas or water leaks. Flexible fittings will be less likely to break.

And more than anything else, prepare and execute a plan for reforestation and vegetation management using optimally selected trees and vegetation.

Media and Community Education Ideas:
In an area prone to landslides, publish a special newspaper section with emergency information on landslides and debris flows. Localize the information by including the phone numbers of local emergency services offices, the American Red Cross chapter, and hospitals, as well as publish reliable sources for consulting services, geotechnical engineering and landscaping businesses, vegetation and trees optimally adapted for hillside and landslide management; as well as personal testimony and experiences of people who have addressed the issue successfully.

Report on what city and county governments are doing to reduce the possibility of landslides. Interview local officials about local land- use zoning regulations. Be aware that often, local government is very slow to act, and that their way of addressing problems might be vastly different from what you’d wish them to be. In other words, you might find that zoning laws, city hall and the fire department, for example, are your adversaries, rather than your allies, in your efforts to address the major environmental issue of hillside and landslide management with rational and long-term environmental solutions. Be prepared!

Advocate simple and high impact solutions, and work on putting government back on the right side of the problem: If any environmental group or even any individual was offered use or better, property rights after achieving specified results in a given timeframe, in exchange for proper reforestation and hill management, 90% of all landslides and mudslides would be avoided in less than 10 years time.

Actually, it has been estimated that very simple mitigation measures using terracing, wells and optimally adapted trees and vegetation could alleviate up to 50% of the most common landslide related problem in just 1 to 2 years time! And it’s a lot cheaper than facing the in the medium and long-term unavoidable consequences of doing nothing.

More, proper reforestation and vegetation management creates the opportunity of producing wood, fiber and foodstuff, as well as, possibly, new recreational areas, and can greatly contribute to the local microclimate, air quality, and other such environmental issues.
Show people that there is potentially good money to make by doing the right things, which might encourage everyone to actually do the right thing!

What to Do Before Intense Storms and Long Periods of Rain:
Become familiar with the land around you. Learn whether landslides and debris flows have occurred in your area by contacting local officials, state geological surveys or departments of natural resources, and university departments of geology. Knowing the land can help you assess your risk for danger.

Watch the patterns of storm-water drainage on slopes near your home, and especially the places where runoff water converges, increasing flow over soil-covered slopes. Watch the hillsides around your home for any signs of land movement, such as small landslides or debris flows, or progressively tilting trees. Watching small changes could alert you to the potential of a greater landslide threat.

Remember that one ounce of prevention can often help you avoid many pounds if not tons of cure. Learn to “sculpt the land” before hand. Small work beforehand can redirected channels, or diffuse problems, that otherwise could have become acute. Also, issues such as water saturation, water tables, etc, can often be addressed beforehand with natural water-pumps, also known as “trees”. Select cultivars and clones of optimally adapted and relatively fire-resistant trees can grow up to 20 feet a year, reach 80 feet in 6 or 7 years, and have taproots going up to150% deeper than they are tall. Some of these trees can be planted only a few feet apart, and in dense patterns that practically make a mudslide impossible under normal conditions.

What to Do After a Landslide:
Replant damaged ground with fast-growing species as soon as possible since erosion caused by loss of ground cover can lead to flash flooding and mudslides. [Quoted verbatim from federal guidelines.] And, of course, terrace your hills!

Seek the advice of geotechnical and vegetation management experts for evaluating landslide hazards or designing corrective techniques to reduce landslide risk. A professional will be able to advise you of the best ways to prevent or reduce landslide risk, without creating further hazard.

You can find more about what to do about landslides in general here: http://www.prepare.org/text/basic/mudTX.htm . This document was prepared by the National Disaster Education Coalition with contributions of the American Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency, International Association of Emergency Managers, Institute for Business and Home Safety, National Fire Protection Association, National Weather Service, United States Department of Agriculture/Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service and United States Geological Survey. The present document was prepared in part using material found there, and in part with material provided by the Foundation for Naturally Optimal Solutions to Environmental Problems with Regenerative Agriculture & Sylviculture and the Sustainable Organic Regenerative Agriculture & Sylviculture Trust. © 2005 NOSEPRAS Foundation & SORAS Trust. All rights reserved worldwide.

SAVING GAIA NOW - THE 8 NEXUSES OF AWARENESS -- 1 - THE FUNDATIONAL NEXUS -- THE NECESSARY & FUNDAMENTAL AWARENESS

2005-02-17T23:49:00.000-08:00

SAVING GAIA NOW - THE 8 NEXUSES OF AWARENESS

You are here at: http://savegaia.blogspot.com/2005/02/saving-gaia-now-8-nexuses-of-awareness.html

1 - THE FUNDATIONAL NEXUS -- THE NECESSARY FUNDAMENTAL AWARENESS:

There is a sad reality: As long as you do not understand the following, you cannot do anything for the planet. Also, and perhaps even more importantly, from your own point of view, you cannot really do anything for those you love or care for, and for yourself.

At that stage, people are, in fact, like blind but hyperactive children, enthralled by Maya, the Illusion of Things. Totally unaware of what will impact their destiny, of what is happening around them, which sooner or later will befall them.Becoming fully conscious and totally aware of what follows will literally change your life, and is indeed the very base on which everything else can be built.

Earth is a living organism. This was demonstrated a century ago by Helan Jaworski, and was later further explored by the "Gaia Hypothesis".

About this, please see what SaveGaia (then "Sauver la Terre") "Honors Committee" Member, Nobel Laureate, Count Maurice Maeterlinck had to say about this here, as it was entrusted to our Founder Andre Birre in the 1930's:http://savegaia.blogspot.com/2005/02/to-great-genius-of-dr-helan-jaworski.html under the title: "To the Great Genius of Dr Helan JAWORSKI, Modern Pioneer of our Understanding of the Gaeon [Gaia, the Mother Planet], as a Living Organism."

***

To understand this unavoidable fact, just envision the cells in your body as the individual living organisms they actually are, even if they all work together symbiotically to support the overall aggregate, your body. When some cells get damaged or die up, as they constantly do, the overall colony simply replaces them. But if a great number of them get destroyed, ill or sick, as in a cancer, or if key cells misfunction, and particularly the cells in charge of the protection of the overall organism, as in AIDS, then the whole aggregate (that is, YOU) may die, or will die. This, because the whole cell aggregate in turn is a super-organism of its own, YOU, your body as a whole.

Now, simply envision the Earth as being the same thing - a super-organism. Just like you and me. One who evolved naturally, not to "support life" as its primary function, but to *BE* life. And that is exactly the situation we live in: All of us, minerals, vegetals, animals and human beings, we are all part of that super-organism called Earth, and its cancer is often ~us~.

However, once we become conscious and aware of all this, and of what it means, we can turn back into what we meant to be: The caretakers, in truth, the very immune system of the Mother Earth. Becoming again what we are supposed to be, the immune system of our host organism, the one we call the Gaeon or Gaia, the Mother Planet, that is what "Saving Gaia" is all about. This is the only purpose of www.savegaia.com and this is why GAIA NEEDS YOUR HELP!

We must wake up and work all together to save Gaia, or we will be destroyed ourselves. Over-population, abuse of resources, pollution, the poisoning of all food resources with pesticides, terminator seeds and genetically-modified organisms will kill us all as surely as a billion nuclear weapons detonating at once, if we don't *start to do something about it*! It's not only necessary for Gaia's sake, but even more so, for *ours*.

Be sure of one thing: Gaia is stronger than us. Way stronger than us. Gaia will destroy its own cancer and AIDS, one way or another, if no other way, simply by making insane those she wants to destroy. It will happen through (often manmade) diseases. Or the cancer will eat itself (climate changes; loss of ozone; depletion of oxygen sources; over-population leading to pandemia; radioactive poisoning with uranium; nuclear, biologic, chemical or electromagnetic wars; etc, or simply the explosion of a super-volcano, such as the one cooking up under Yellowstone National Park).

Be sure of one more thing: Gaia will grow again, as we go the way of the dinosaurs. So we, that is YOU, first and foremost, since all changes can only start with and within ourselves, YOU either take care of Gaia, or Gaia will take care of us all!

Remember: Either YOU HELP TAKE CARE OF GAIA, or Gaia will take care of us, and that includes you and me!

*********

A bit of perspective: Have you ever heard of Chi Gong, Kung Fu, Taoism?

According to such sources, as quoted by the leader of the banned Chinese Falun Dafa (Falun Gong) movement, who obviously had access to antique sources little-known in the West, there have been no less than *82* advanced civilizations that preceded us, and all went into oblivion before us. And indeed, museums are full of "inexplicable artefacts", such as millions years old pieces of metal machinery found in coal beds.

If you want to know how such things could and did happen, besides cosmic or volcanic cataclysms, or think that such things will never happen again, because we are too "advanced" or "civilized" for that today, maybe you should read the following quotes from old Indian, Egyptian and Middle-Eastern and Biblical sources, or perhaps want to think about hundreds of rather interesting "creation myths"convey.

Here are a few choice tidbits:

In the Sumerian story of the creation of "the adam", that is, "the earthling", found in Mesopotamian texts on clay tablets, it is said: "...to achieve this feat Enki suggested that a ‘being that already exists’, an ape female, be used to create the Lulu Amelu (‘the mixed worker’) by ‘binding’ upon the less evolved beings ‘the mold of the gods’. The goddess Sud purified the ‘essence’ of a young male Anunnaki; she mixed it into the egg of an ape female. The fertilized egg was then implanted in the womb of a female Anunnaki, for the required period of pregnancy. When the ‘mixed creature’ was born, Sud lifted him up and shouted: ‘I have created! My hands have made it!' " Does this story remind you of something, or rings some bell?

Abraham "looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah and he beheld and saw a smoke rising from the earth, as the smoke of a furnace." (Gen 18:27). Z.S., in a 1985 book, remarked: "...the immense cavity in the center of the Sinai and the resulting fracture lines, the vast surrounding flat area covered with blackened stones, traces of radiation south of the Dead Sea, the new extent and shape of the Dead Sea... (all this) is still there, four thousand years later."

During the war between Horus and Seth, recounted in old Egyptian chronicles, when Horus strikes, he: "...let loose against them a storm which they could neither see with their eyes, nor hear with their ears. It brought death to all of them in a single moment."

When Zeus battled the Titans: "The hot vapor lapped around the Titans, of Gaia born, flame unspeakable rose bright to the upper air. The flashing glare of the Thunder-Stone, its lightning, blinded their eyes -- so strong it was. Astounding heat seized Chaos. It seemed as if Earth itself and wide Heaven above had come together, a mighty crash, as though Earth was hurled to ruin. Also were the winds brought rumbling, earthquake and dust storm, thunder and lightning..." "A flame shot forth from the stricken lord Tryphon in the dim, rugged, secluded valley of the Mount, when he was smitten. A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor, melting as tin melts when heated by man’s art, in the glow of a blazing fire did the earth melt down."

In the MahaBharata, you can find the text that inspired Robert Oppenheimer quote ("I have become Death, the Destroyer of worlds"), made at Alamogordo in 1945, when the first nuclear device was voluntarly detonated: "...a single projectile, charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright as a thousand suns, rose in all its splendor. It was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas... The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. The hair and nails fell out; pottery broke without apparent cause; and the birds turned white after a few hours... All foodstuffs were infected... To escape from this fire the soldiers threw themselves in streams to wash themselves and their equipment." Asked a couple years later in a press conference if this had been the first nuclear explosion, he said: "Yes. Well... the first in our times..."

From the Ramayana: When the god Rama is "threatened by a army of monkeys" he puts a "magic arrow" into action, which "produces a flash of lighting stronger than the heat from a hundred thousand suns", "turning everything to dust..."

In the Mahabharata, you can find the following: "...white hot smoke that was a thousand times brighter than the sun rose in infinite brilliance and reduced the city to ashes. Water boiled... Horses and war chariots were burned by the thousands... The corpses of the fallen were mutilated by the terrible heat so that they no longer looked like human beings."

From the "Book of Dzyan", one of the oldest chronicles of India: "Separation did not bring peace to these people and finally their anger reached a point where the ruler of the original city took with him a small number of his warriors and they rose into the air in a huge shining metal vessel. While they were many leagues from the city of their enemies, they launched a great shining lance that rode on a beam of light. It burst apart in the city of their enemies with a great ball of flame that shot up to the heavens, almost to the stars. All those who were in the city were horribly burned and even those who were not in the city - but nearby - were burned also. Those who looked upon the lance and the ball of fire were blinded forever afterward. Those who entered the city on foot became ill and died. Even the dust of the city was poisoned, as were the rivers that flowed through it. Men dared not go near it, and it gradually crumbled into dust and was forgotten by men. When the leader saw what he had done to his own people, he retired to his palace and refused to see anyone. Then he gathered about him those warriors, who remained, and their wives and children, and they entered their vessels and rose one by one into the sky and sailed away. Nor did they return."

What else do you need, to wake up?

Also in the Mahabharata, Arjuna is given a "celestial weapon" which he cannot use against humans "for it might destroy the world", but he could use it "outside this world" against "any foe who is not human." Folly comes in , when we start using such things against ourselves...

From a comment about the Manhattan Project: "Here's a ‘fun’ fact: Very little was known about what the actual effect of an atomic explosion would be prior to its actual detonation. There was one theory, for instance, which suggested the detonation might spark a chain reaction that would burn up the entire atmosphere of the planet Earth, instantly and horrifically killing the entire human race in one fell stroke (and just about every other living thing as well). But great scientists don't let themselves be stopped by little worries like that. The test went forward...”

"The ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana, for example, recounts a war between Rama, prince of Ayodhya in India, and Ravana, ruler of Sri Lanka. When Lakshmana offered Rama a new weapon that could 'destroy the entire race of the enemy, including those who could not bear arms', Rama responded that such a weapon could not be used 'because such destruction en masse was forbidden by the ancient laws of war, even though Ravana was fighting an unjust war with an unrighteous objective'." -- Jayantha Dhanapala, UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament, New York, 9 May 2002, speech at the "Spring Meeting of the Section of International Law and Practice - American Bar Association"

And now, meditate a second on this one:

"In accepting his Nobel Peace Prize on 10 December 2001, Secretary-General Kofi Annan commented on a phenomenon known as the 'Butterfly Effect' -- According to scientists, the world of nature is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest can generate a violent storm on the other side of the earth. He noted that, for better or worse, the world of human activity also has its own 'Butterfly Effect' -- Human actions can either save the world or destroy it." -- Jayantha Dhanapala, UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament, New York, 9 May 2002, speech at the "Spring Meeting of the Section of International Law and Practice - American Bar Association"

Think of it!

And realize that We, The Peoples; We, Human Beings, we -each of us- can choose conscious awareness, at any time, including, *right now*. We can turn away from being diseased, cancerous, self-destructing cells proliferating on Gaia, the Living Planet. We can go back to being what we were meant to be: Her caretakers, Her very immune system.

YOU can. The choice is YOURS. GAIA NEEDS YOU!

Now!

***

Writes us, and become a member, while you can still MAKE A DIFFERENCE! mailto:joinGaia@savegaia.com

(If typing or cuting and pasting, delete the "mailto:" part.)

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BEYOND ORGANIC - BIODYNAMIC: LOOKING FOR SOME LAND IN OR NEAR W. LOS ANGELES (MALIBU, SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS CANYONS, ETC) FOR MODEL FACILITY

2005-02-16T02:11:00.000-08:00

A WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY TO SHOWCASE TRULY ORGANIC AND SUSTAINABLE FARMING & GARDENING

http://www.savegaia.com/ IS LOOKING FOR SOME LAND in or near West LOS ANGELES (such as Malibu, Santa Monica mountains canyons, etc) TO OPERATE MODEL FACILITY SHOWCASING HOW ANYONE CAN GROW "MIRACLE PLANTS" WITH IMMUNE SYSTEM BOOSTING PROPERTIES -- a wonderful opportunity to showcase truly organic & sustainable farming & gardening, as well as what it can be used for!

"We can do no great things, only small things with great love." - Mother Theresa

[The process of creating this model facility will be thoroughly documented through multimedia recordings, and made widely available using relevant technologies, such as DVD, RSS feeds, etc, so to be easily replicated anywhere in the world.]

BEYOND ORGANIC - BIODYNAMIC: http://www.savegaia.com/ will demonstrate HOW YOU TOO CAN GROW "MIRACLE PLANTS" WITH IMMUNE SYSTEM BOOSTING PROPERTIES

If any of you readers own a piece of land in or near Los Angeles (at least 1 acre, the more the better, and ideally -but not necessarily- zoned agricultural or horse property), www.savegaia.com just partnered with one of the best available experts on bio-dynamic organic agriculture, Jack McAndrew, whose biodynamic composts have been the secret behind some of the most beautiful gardens in "Hollywood" and on the Westside for many years, the sort of gardens of the rich and famous you can see depicted in Better Homes & Gardens.[Please email us if you need some of this compost, we will forward all requests to him.]

Jack is ready to start a serious model composting facility of the type of what Dr Ehrenfried Pfeiffer ran for the City of Oakland for many years in the past century, and this, absolutely at no costs to us! We also have volunteers lined up to help us with the workload... but we still need to find the land!

"Mother planet is showing us the red warning light - "be careful,” she is saying. To take care of the planet is to take care of our own house." - HH, the Dalai Lama

More, to the full extent of what available space will permit, we intend to use the place for a pilot "Community Supported Agriculture" project, to illustrate the value of raw and living foods in human and animal nutrition, and for pilot projects growing "miracle plants" and "miracle trees" such as:

Agaricus Blazei -- an immune system booster, a mushroom delicious to eat, close cousin to the common supermarket mushroom A. Campestris, currently building great interest because of its documented effects on AIDS and HIV+ patients, particularly in form of added longevity];

Artemisia Annua -- a form of wormwood, which has similar effects, but with cancer and malaria];

Paulownia Tomentosa -- a nitrogen-fixing high carbon absorption tree that has varieties which can grow to 80+ feet in 7 to 10 years ["Don't put your face over it or you may get a mouthful of leaves." Jimmy Carter- Former President and Commercial Paulownia Grower, discussing the trees fast growth.], producing rich animal feed and very valuable wood, and a 100 feet long taproot very useful for hill management, landslide prevention, etc, plus leaves that are valuable as a base for nutraceuticals; or, best of all,

Moringa Oleifera & Moringa Stenopetala, trees which are *entirely edible* and also strong immune-system boosters: The leaves are delicious and contain more iron than spinach, 2 times more calcium than milk, 3 times more potassium than bananas, and 7 times more Vitamin C than oranges, among plenty of other things (the list goes on and on), including numerous compounds of medicinal value -- and it grows up to 15 feet a year too and should be part of a comprehensive program of terracing hills for landslide control as well!

This is the famous tree that population reductionists hate, because it is already making a significant dent into the development of the AIDS pandemic in Central and South Africa, which was promising to depopulate the entire continent... Now, if it can save the life of a malnourished African child with little or no medical support, and of his mother too, *imagine* what it could do for a well-fed, well-cared-for person in West Hollywood!

If you have a piece of unused land, donating it for a substantial tax deduction, or simply making it available at low or no cost for a reasonably long period of time could make a HUGE difference in many people's lives... In fact, this is probably one of the single most widely useful and compassionate thing you could ever do! Think of it! One acre of land could save many lives, right here, right now, including of people you personally know... and perhaps even *yours*!

And please don't forget: "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike." - John Muir

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

PS: (Delete the mailto: part if you type the addresses yourself). If anyone you know has AIDS or CANCER or any immune system related diseases, this is something you might want to send them to look at, or volunteer for! mailto:volunteers@savegaia.com

PPS: If you know html, graphic design, RSS, PHP, PERL, MySQL, etc, or are a writer/editor, and would like to volunteer some of your time for a great cause, please email here: mailto:volunteers@savegaia.com

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Global Change and the Earth System

2005-02-15T01:19:00.000-08:00

BOOK REVIEW: “Global Change and the Earth System”, by W. Steffen and others, Springer-Verlag, £77/$129, ISBN 3540408002 Reviewed by Fred Pearce, under the title: “Gaia may not save us”

THERE are two sorts of concern for the environment. There is all that touchy-feely stuff about saving cuddly animals, and there is saving the planet from humanity's mega-depredations. Earth-system science deals with the latter. It deals with how our planet works, and offers suggestions about how we might avoid the Gulf Stream shutting down, save the ozone layer and stop the oceans from turning so acid that they dissolve the coral reefs.

It's a crowded agenda. And this scholarly but highly readable primer to the fate of the Earth, written by a dozen leading lights in a worldwide scientific network known as the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, seems to cover a new global peril on almost every one of its 300-odd pages. After spreading deserts and blooming oceans, Asian brown haze and the sulfur cycle, global warming almost seems like an afterthought.

One remarkable development on show in Global Change and the Earth System is the extent to which the Gaia hypothesis has taken over research into Earth systems, guiding researchers to new feedback between the geosphere and the biosphere. Will Gaia save us, after all? Probably not. The bad news seems to be that all Gaia's comforting negative feedbacks - designed, as true Gaians would have it, to maintain a habitable planet - are being overwhelmed and could be heading for chaotic mode. Hold onto your hats.

From issue 2435 of the New Scientist, a leading British science magazine, 21 February 2004, page 51.

To the Great Genius of Andre BIRRE, Founder of the "ORGANISATION FOR THE SERVICE OF LIFE" and "SAUVER LA TERRE"

2005-02-14T23:56:00.000-08:00

WHO WAS ANDRE BIRRE, who founded the "ORGANISATION FOR THE SERVICE OF LIFE" and "SAUVER LA TERRE -- SAVE GAIA"?

"We are so hypnotized by the black gold we call oil, of which the supply is limited, that we fail to see that everyone can exploit that other gold-humus-not only without exhausting the supply, but constantly increasing it." - Andre Birre, "Humus: Wealth and Health of the Earth"

LECTURES @ THE CONSCIOUS LIFE EXPO

2005-02-10T18:48:00.000-08:00

Tickets are required to attend the Conscious Life Expo. You can place your order online or call 800-367-5777 . ecture are 45 minutes presentations running throughout the 3 Day event and are FREE for General Admission Ticket Holders. Click on Title for more info.

Details can be found here:
http://www.consciouslifeexpo.com/lectures.html

FRIDAY
3:00-3:45
Anna Coy
Free Yourself From Pain: Learn to Breathe
3:00-3:45
Roger Valentine
What Is Regenesis Transformation
3:00-3:45
Mary Beal
Transforming Challenging Times Into Healing
4:00-4:45
Diana Payne
Facing the Dweller at the Threshold
4:00-4:45
Gloria Martel
Look Younger in 40 Minutes
4:00-4:45
VJ Kumar
Ayurveda
5:00-5:45
Tsu-Tsair Chi
Fingernail and Tongue Analysis
5:00-5:45
Maggie Mellor
The Yogis' Secret for Manifestation Revealed
5:00-5:45
George Sedena Cappannelli
Finding Your Authentic Career Path
5:00-6:45
Brenda Ridgeway
Opening Up Your Own Intuitive Awareness
5:00-5:45
Leah Mueller
Astroplay--Astrology Comes Alive
6:00-6:45
Kelly Gaisford
Cellular Regeneration for Optimal Health and Longevity
6:00-6:45
Selacia
Change your DNA for Loving Relationships
6:00-6:45
Laura DesJardins
How to Make Money in a Spiritual Way
6:00-6:45
Susan Levin
The Business of Speaking: A Marketing Strategy
7:00-7:45
Tom Walker, PhD
New Science and Spiritual Prosperity
7:00-7:45
William Henry
Secret Symbols & Codes: Meanings and Messages Revealed
7:00-7:45
Robert Jaffe MD
The Sufi Way to Healing
7:00-7:45
Abbie Breit
Future Medicine: Safe Removal of Toxic Metals
8:00-8:45
Verna V Aridon Yater
Spirit Doctors and Sound Healing
8:00-8:45
Richard Boylan
Star Kids, the Emerging Cosmic Generation
8:00-8:45
Dr Sari Sutka
Optimal Health
8:00-8:45
Terres Unsoeld
Awakening Your Soul with Sound, Color and Movement

SATURDAY
10:00-10:45
Linda Schumacher
Liquid Nutritional Supplements
10:00-10:45
Robert Jaffe, MD
The Sufi Way to Healing
10:00-10:45
Heidi Dolce
Your Body’s pH Levels and Your Health
10:00-10:45
Anthony Tung
Positive Posture and Fat Burning Weight Loss
11:00-11:45
Herb Stockman
The Future is Energetic Medicine
11:00-11:45
Laura DesJardins
Astrology: An Adventure in Consciousness
11:00-11:45
Dr. Luke Cua
Traditional Chinese Medicine for Difficult Cases
11:00-11:45
John Clyde
Working With Energy for Your Health
12:00-12;45
Dr M Pangelinan
Gland Therapies and Glandular Repair
12:00-12;45
Dael Walker
The Power of Energy Healing
12:00-12;45
Linda Chollar
Reflexology for Pain Control
12:00-12:45
Dr. Alex Pana, M.D., D.D.S.
Holistic Whole Body Dentistry
12:00-12;45
Lisa Silverman
The Art of Spiritual Dreaming
1:00-1:45
Sandra Mckee
Unity in Phi
1:00-1:45
Joyce Kenyon
The High Road to Healing, Love and Enlightenment
1:00-1:45
Janis Kristjanson
Radiant Skin Without Surgery
1:00-1:45
Darlene
Become A Ph Miracle
2:00-2:45
Gerry Snelling
The Miracle of the New High-Dose Fish Oil
2:00-2:45
David Olszewski
Practical Applications Of Light and Heat Therapy
2:00-2:45
Robert Mathews
Healing Your Relationship with Money
2:00-2:45
Patricia Heller
How to Live a Life You Love or Love the Life You Live
3:00-3:45
Amba Zeller
Health Secrets of the Amazon Rainforest
3:00-3:45
Sally Veillette
Coming to Your Senses—Today!
3:00-3:45
Phyllis Light
Living Safely & Spiritually in a High-Tech World
3:00-3:45
Sri Ram Kaa & Kira Raa
Galactic Blueprint: the Gift of Global Reunion
4:00-4:45
Cyn Blashaw
Your Cells are Talking to You…Are You Listening?
4:00-4:45
Greg Wendt
Align Your Money With Your Values
4:00-4:45
Marg Hartwig
The Miracles of Cleansing
4:00-4:45
Nancy & Joe Belton
Breathe the Breath of Life
5:00-5:45
Sandy Harton
Oxygen – The Breath of Life
5:00-5:45
James Boschman
Essential Nutrition
5:00-5:45
Brenda Ridgeway
Opening Up Your Own Intuitive Awareness
5:00-5:45
Fran Sterling
Dangers of Computers, Cell Phones & EMFs
6:00-6:45
Clelia Vahni
Divine Alchemy
6:00-6:45
Dr Mick Hall
Energy Vortex Technologies
6:00-6:45
Paul & Lillie Weisbart
Stellar Body Wellness
6:00-6:45
Terry Gibbons
Choosing, Finding and Attracting a Life Mate
7:00-7:45
Seraph Hanfling
Global Response Environmenatl Letter Writing
7:00-7:45
Paula Thompson
Astonishing Evidence of ET Visitation
7:00-7:45
Douglas Taylor
The Science of Reincarnation
7:00-7:45
Tom Walker, PhD
Ancient Wisdom, Modern Enigma
8:00-8:45
Melana Teves
Malena’s Psychic Makeover!
8:00-8:45
Wynn Free
InterdimensInterdimensional Communication
8:00-8:45
Prem Rawat
Words of Peace: A DVD Presentation
8:00-8:45
Michael Langevin
Secrets of the Ancient Incas
8:00-8:45
Susan Miller
The Year Ahead 2005

SUNDAY
10:00-10:45
Scott Bartlett
A Spiritual Being Living A Human Life
10:00-10:45
Shari Silvey
Mini Playshop: Transform & Become The Butterfly
10:00-10:45
Greg Hoag
The Secret Truths Behind Sacred Geometry and Feng Shui
10:00-10:45
John Clyde
Profound Meditation with Hemi-Sync® and Other Energy Tools
11:00-11:45
Ani Vivienne
Awakening The Soul Meditation
11:00-11:45
Katrina Kittlles
Sacred Lover
11:00-11:45
Robert Perala
Extraterrestrial Emissaries
11:00-11:45
Dr Mick Hall
Energy Vortex Technologies
12:00-12;45
Eric Brummel
Connecting Through Tradition
12:00-12;45
Bridget Hansard
Violet Flame Alchemy of the Aquarian Age
12:00-12;45
Liza Glazer and Ted Stefan
Experiential Workshop: Light and Soul
12:00-12;45
Astarius
Shamanic Sound Healing
1:00-1:45
Carol Morgan
Radical Relationship Repair
1:00-1:45
Berry Kapp
Increasing Psychic Abilities with Plant Essences
1:00-1:45
Daniel Venograd
Understanding Disease: A Practical Approach
1:00-1:45
Rick Wagner
Gut Level Health
2:00-2:45
Deborah Banker Md
Natural Vision Improvement - Reversing the Aging Process
2:00-2:45
Cristhal Bennet
The Cosmic Shift: The Age of Awakening is Upon Us
2:00-2:45
Walter Wainright
Anti-Cancer Soy Phytochemicals in Soybeans
2:00-2:45
Victor Barron
Humanity's Spiritual Plague
3:00-3:45
Alfred King
Discover the Power of Your Birthstone
3:00-3:45
Anita Cramm
Prophesies of the Times to Come
3:00-3:45
Stephen Feig
Super Digestion: Healing Your Guts
3:00-3:45
Phyllis Light
Living Safely & Spiritually in a High-Tech World
4:00-4:45
Kelley Gaisford
Hidden Dangers in Food: How to Protect You and Your Children
4:00-4:45
Jodell Bumatay
Advanced Psychic Healing and Training in Everyday Life
4:00-4:45
Fabien Maman
Accessing Tama-Do, "Way of the Soul"
4:00-4:45
Helaine Harris
Awakening Your True Power
5:00-5:45
J Shima Moore
Self-Hypnosis: Authenticity, Achievement and Relaxation
5:00-5:45
Len Watson
The "Ultimate Cleanse" --The Foundation of Rejuvenation
5:00-5:45
Shelly Blechman
Nutrition - The Way to Health
5:00-5:45
Kathryn Alice
Five Steps To Your Soulmate
6:00-6:45
Beth Carpenter
Medical Intuitive – What is it?
6:00-6:45
Donna Fox
The Akashic Records and You
5:00-5:45
Laura Lee
Your Guradian Angels Revealed
6:00-6:45
Victoria Overton
Success Consciousness -Manifestation 101
6:00-6:45
Eli Davidson, M.A.
Jumpstart Your Life: Making Change Easy, Fast and Fun

LOS ANGELES CONSCIOUS LIFE EXPO

2005-02-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

If you are in the Los Angeles area, you don't want to miss that one!

Conscious Life Expo Feb. 11-13, LAX Hilton
5711 West Century Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90045>> Web Site: http://www.consciouslifeexpo.com
Phone: (310) 410-4000 x 6280

You can place your order for tickets online or call 800-367-5777. Workshops are 90 minute presentations running throughout the 3 day event.

Philosophy

We live in an evolving universe, in an orgasmic nuclear dance of consciousness. Everything is changing, evolving, transforming. Wise men and women throughout history have tried to define the nature of the reality in which they found themselves. Myriad models have existed- most have fallen into the historical garbage heap, others cling by threads. We, these generations, are creating a new model. Is it all figured out and defined? No. Do we know some of the elements of what this future model might look like? Yes.

The primary intention of the 2005 Conscious Life Conference and Exposition is simple: to participate in the conscious co-creation of a new world, a world based on new paradigms in science, in spirituality, in longevity, in local and global community, in relationship, in health and well-being. And while we co-create this new wholistic model through our authentic self expression, we also participate in a powerful and passionate celebration of life and love.

The purpose of the Conscious Life Conference and Exposition is to bring us all together. It is a three-day gathering of the tribes, a three-day celebration of evolution and consciousness and a three-day brainstorming session on who we are, where we are and where we are going.

We have chosen our logo to reflect the Conscious Life experience- a gateway to a higher force, an opening to the future possibilities, the descent of the new paradigm into our earthly existence.

In Memoriam, To the Great Genius of Jean Pain, who was hailed as Europe's King of Green Gold

2005-02-09T18:44:00.000-08:00

In Memoriam,
to the Great Genius of Jean Pain,

who was hailed as Europe's King of Green Gold.

I - Nicolas Poulain's article, published in the Reader's Digest -- Nov. 1981 -- pages 76-81)

Using a new, exciting and amazingly simple technique, this self-taught scientist may be helping to solve the world's energy crisisIT IS DUSK as I arrive at the Domaine des Ternpliers, a 241-hectare timber tract backed on to the Alpes de Haute-Provence. Driving over a bumpy mud road that snakes across a barren moor near Villecrore (Var), I come upon a big white house, home of Jean Pain, a 51-year-old Frenchman.Until recently, Pain was an unknown. Today, he's hailed as "the king of green gold," and energy experts from all over the globe have come to Domaine des Templiers to study the miracle Pain has wrought: an amazingly simple, and incredibly inexpensive system that extracts both energy and fertilizer (gold) from plant life (green). These scientists are hopeful that Pain's new process will go a long way in helping overcome the worldwide shortage of fuel.Says Andre Birre, author of Humus: Wealth and Health of the Earth, concerning the Pain method: "We are so hypnotized by the black gold we call oil, of which the supply is limited, that we fail to see that everyone can exploit that other black gold -humus- not only without exhausting the supply, but constantly increasing it."I knock on the door and am greeted warmly by Jean Pain and his wife, Ida. Jean, I notice, has a wrestler's build and a hermit's calm. He accompanies me to about 50 meters (about 170 feet) from the front door and shows me the object of the world's attention -- a homemade power plant that supplies 100 per cent of the Pains' energy needs. What I see is a mound, three meters (10 Ft) high and six (20 Ft) across, made of tiny pieces of brushwood.This vegetable cocktail, Pain explains, made of tree limbs and pulverized underbrush, is a compost, much like the pile of decaying organic matter that people build in their gardens, using food scraps and leaves. Buried inside the 50-ton compost, he says, is a steel tank with a capacity of four cubic meters. It is three-fourths full of the same compost, which has first been steeped in water for two months. The tank is hermetically sealed, but is connected by tubing to 24-truck-tyre inner tubes, banked nearby in piles. The tubes serve as a reservoir for the methane gas produced as the compost ferments."Once the gas is distilled, washed through small stones in water -- and compressed," Pain explains, "we use it to cook our food, produce our electricity and fuel our truck." He says that it takes about 90 days to produce 500 cubic meters of gas -- enough to keep Ida's two ovens and a three-burner stove going for a year. Leading to a room behind the house, he shows me the methane-fuelled internal combustion engine that turns a generator, producing 100 watts every hour. This charges an accumulator battery, which stores the current, providing all the Pains need to light their five-room house.As Ida drives off in their truck, I see on the roof two gas bottles shaped like long cannon shells. These have a capacity of five cubic meters of compressed gas, allowing her to drive 100 kilometers. Jean says that ten kilos of brushwood supply the gas equivalent of a liter of high-test petrol. All that is needed to use it as motor fuel is a slight carburetor adjustment.We walk back to the compost. Jean points to a 40-millimeter-thick plastic tube that runs from a well, through the heap and on to a tap inside the house. He explains that compost heats as it ferments, raising the temperature so that cold water, arriving from the well after passing through 200 meters of tubing wound round the tank, emerges at 60 degrees C. I personally confirm that the water arrives cold at the "cake" and comes out scalding. Once inside the house, the hot water circulates through radiators and heats the house. The compost heap continues fermenting for nearly 18 months, supplying hot water at a rate of four liters a minute, enough to satisfy the central heating, bathroom and kitchen requirements. Then the installation is dismantled and a new compost system is set up at once to assure a continuous supply of hot water.

Gigantic Growth

The inert, brushwood compost now provides Pain with still another use. Once fermentation ends, the big, magic cake produces no more energy, but it will still render 50 tons of natural fertilizer. By spreading a layer of this humus on the poor, stony soil around the house, Jean Pain has created a luxurious farm garden where even tropical vegetables grow. I admire tomato plants two-and-a-half meters high, lift a six-kilo watermelon and inspect a chayote (a kind of sweet Zucchini -- hitherto found only in the West Indies and in Africa), What surprises me most is that these giant vegetables need no watering; all the water they require, Pain tells me, is synthesized in the compost.The ingenious power plant Pain has developed and built with his own hands took 15 years of tireless effort. lt all started while Pain was gathering brushwood and noticed that wherever it was found the vegetation underneath seemed to grow more abundantly. The reason, he learnt, is that as branches, leaves and shrubs decompose they form the nutritious humus that enriches the earth. To imitate nature and produce humus, he thought, we could trim excess undergrowth from the forests. Then perhaps we could capture the energy produced by the fermentation that transforms this brushwood into humus.

A Discovery - How the Jean Pain process works

Jean Pain has no diploma; but he is intelligent, highly adaptable and keenly observant. And starting in 1965, be devoured dozens of books on science while carrying out his first experiments. He began by fermenting the brushwood cuttings as he brought them in, but soon realized that fermentation would be more efficient if the bigger boughs were chopped up as finely as possible. No machine for this existed, so he invented one, building it in his garage with salvaged material. The potential significance of Pain's discovery is enormous. What it means, to Pain, is that forests can become twenty-first-century man's "guardian angels."The stakes for France are obviously high. While the French import 126 million tons of oil annually, throwing their balance of payments seriously off the mark, French forests constitute an energy back-up with a potential that biologist Robert du Pontavice estimates as equivalent to 20 million tons of oil (TEP). Nor are these merely "theoretical" and impractical resources.Pain has taken the costs of his method into account. He has gone over and over his calculations and the figures are there: 1,000 hectares of forest can supply 6,000 tons of fertilizer a year, 960,000 cubic meters of biogas (or 480,000 liters oil equivalent) and millions of liters of hot water. And exploiting the forest costs only 12 per cent of the energy extracted from it.What's more, the cycle can be repeated indefinitely as brushwood is renewed every seven years. Thus, not only would the forest remain clean and free from the danger of fire, but would provide an inexhaustible supply of fertilizer and thermal energy.

Multiple Usages

Already in France and throughout the world, many uses are being made of the techniques Pain developed at the Dornaine des Templiers. In France, eight municipalities have chosen to adopt his techniques for recycling vegetation and supplying heat and hot water to public buildings, hot-houses and sports facilities."In Sainpuits (Yonne), a village of 500 inhabitants, we heat several buildings with the object of proving the value of the system," I was told by Etienne Bonvallet, project foreman of the pilot operation. In the Savoie, Chambery began to use Jean Pain's method in January 1980. A 200-cubic-meter compost bed, made of broken wood from plane trees and lime trees, will supply 23,400 kilocalories an hour and heat a 200 square-meter hot-house. Within two years, it will be possible to salvage 80 cubic meters of humus for the community gardens.Says Henri Stehle, internationally respected agriculture expert and botanist and Institute of France prize-winner, "At the end of the path Pain has opened, stands tomorrow's self-sufficient agribusiness producing its own fertilizer and the power to run its equipment." Pain's methods are beginning to spread to the rest of Europe. In Brussels, Belgium, a compost plant and a flourishing garden exist This is the experimental station of the International Jean Pain Committee, formed in 1978 by Frederik Van den Brande, former Belgian secretary-general of the Council of European Townships, to publicize Pain's techniques.

Verdant Future
This station is the showcase of the Jean Pain committee, and its pride. But the committee has many other activities. It puts out brochures, gives lectures, and organizes twice yearly, two-week training programs where 100-odd farmers, students, and environmental specialists from various parts of the world study grinding, composting, and methane production procedures.Both in France and abroad, Jean Pain's methods are certain to be applied over a wider field. Pain has devoted followers in Australia, the United States, Tunis, Latin America and Japan, The book he wrote with his wife, already translated into five languages, has sold 70,000 copies.International energy expert Robert Giry, author of “Is Nuclear Energy Useless?”, predicts: "In our times of crisis, with European agriculture in danger of one day suddenly finding itself deprived of energy, the path opened by Jean Pain for the production of fertilizer, fuel and electricity could lead to a brimming future."The simplest principles often underlie the most useful discoveries. Now, when soil exhaustion and the search for new energy sources are the leading brain-twisters in the developed societies, Jean Pain, the self-taught scientist with calloused hands, offers a commonsense solution: the green gold that's to be found almost everywhere in the world. It is here, under our feet; we have only to stoop down to gather it.

WHO NEEDS FRANKENFOODS also known as "GMOs" or GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS?

2005-02-09T02:02:00.000-08:00

Even the New York Times acknowledges the fact!

Simple Method Found to Vastly Increase Crop Yields
By CAROL KAESUK YOON, New York Times, August 22, 2000

In a stunning new result from what has become one of the largest agricultural experiments ever, thousands of rice farmers in China have doubled the yields of their most valuable crop and nearly eliminated its most devastating disease – without using chemical treatments or spending a single extra penny.

Under the direction of an international team of scientists, farmers in China's Yunnan Province implemented a simple change in their rice paddies.

Instead of planting the large stands of a single type of rice, as they typically have done, the farmers planted a mixture of two different rices.
With this one change, growers were able to radically restrict the incidence of rice blast – the most important disease of this most important staple in the world. Within just two years, farmers were able to abandon the chemical fungicides previously widely used to fight the disease. "I wasn't surprised that the system worked but I was surprised that it worked so well," said Dr. Christopher Mundt, population biologist at Oregon State University and the one American-based author on the study, which was published in the current edition of the journal Nature. "I'm excited about the possibilities. There is a lot of potential even beyond rice."

Dr. Youyong Zhu, plant pathologist at Yunnan Agricultural University, heads the mostly China-based research team whose study now covers 100,000 acres and involves tens of thousands of farmers. In fact, many researchers have long argued that planting a diversity of crops should lead to benefits like greater productivity and the suppression of disease, compared with single variety plantings known as monocultures. Yet the use of diversity and other ecologically based cures for agricultural ills have tended to be viewed as more politically correct than economically viable. Scientists say that this latest study shows that such environmentally friendly methods can be highly effective, even more effective, in this case, than standard chemical pesticides.

Calling the results "very significant," Dr. Alison Power, agricultural ecologist at Cornell University, said, "People have said that these kinds of ecological approaches wouldn't work on a commercial scale. This is a huge scale." She added, "We have more alternatives that are really viable than we often think about or include in our arsenal of possibilities." Those studying natural ecosystems also welcomed the new work, saying it closely paralleled findings for the role of species diversity in reducing the incidence of disease in the wild.

"It's an important study," said Dr. David Tilman, ecologist at the University of Minnesota. "It's going to raise a great deal of interest." The scientific hypothesis behind the study, the latest in a growing number examining the effects of biodiversity, is simple. If one variety of a crop is susceptible to a disease, the more concentrated those susceptible types are, the more easily disease can spread and the more victims it can claim. The disease should be less likely to spread, however, if susceptible plants are separated from one another by other kinds of plants that do not succumb to the disease and can act as a barrier. Rice blast fungus, which destroys millions of tons of rice and costs farmers several billion dollars in losses each year, moves from plant to plant as an airborne spore – a method of transport that should easily be blocked by a row of disease-resistant plants.

Scientists tested the hypothesis by asking farmers to plant their farms in experimental plots using two kinds of rice: a standard rice that does not usually succumb to rice blast disease and a much more valuable sticky rice known to be highly susceptible.

Farmers also planted control plots of monocultures, allowing scientists to rigorously test the importance of the mixtures in the health and productivity on these farms.

What scientists found was that farmers garnered even more benefit from the mixtures than expected. Resistant plants did block the airborne spores in a field, but as more and more farmers became involved in the study, these positive effects began to multiply across the region. Not only were disease spores not blowing in from the next row, they were no longer coming from the next farmer's field either or the next or the next, rapidly damping the spread of the disease on a grand scale.

In addition, scientists found that the sticky rice plants, which poked up above the shorter, standard rice plants with which they were grown enjoyed sunnier, warmer and drier conditions than they would have in a stand of tall, sticky rice plants. These conditions appeared to discourage the growth of the fungal rice blast in the sticky rice plants.

The fact that rice blast is the most devastating disease of rice, the staple crop of most people worldwide, would alone make the study important.
Scientists interviewed said there was no reason, however, why mixtures could not decrease disease spread in other crops as well, though how powerful and useful a remedy it will be is likely to vary.

"There's already a lot of work with barley in Europe and coffee in Colombia," said Dr. Mundt. "I've seen beautiful disease reduction in mixtures of willows grown in England."

The study is of particular interest for organic farming as it involves the application of no chemicals.

"Biodiversity is an absolutely essential tool for organic production," said Dr. Martin Wolfe, director of research at Elm Farm Research Centre, an agricultural research institute. "It's an essential part of the armory."
Yet, Dr. Wolfe said, even organic farmers underuse diversity, as they also have been indoctrinated in the simplicity of and seduced by the universality of monocultures.

Some of the obstacles to using different varieties include the extra work of keeping track of and maintaining a diversity of plants that can require different kinds of tending and harvesting. If kinds of crops require different harvesting methods or are harvested at different times, it can increase the effort a farmer must expend in a given field. In Yunnan province, farmers harvested rice grains by hand, making it simple to gather and sell the two rice varieties separately. Some scientists argue such problems can also be overcome with mechanized harvesting. In the Pacific Northwest where an increasing number of farmers are using mixtures of wheat to increase yields and cut down disease, growers may choose varieties that differ in useful qualities, such as resistance to disease, but that can still be harvested and sold together.

Researchers say the study's implications extend to prairies, rainforests and other natural ecosystems. Just as the new study examines the role of a diversity of crops in fighting disease and in productivity of a rice paddy, biodiversity studies have been examining whether increased species number can affect such things as the health of plants in natural settings.
So far the two kinds of studies appear to support one another well. For example, Dr. Tilman and Charles Mitchell, an ecologist at University of Minnesota, have found evidence in prairie ecosystems that an increased diversity of plant species decreases the incidence of disease. As in the rice paddies, in natural ecosystems, when there is a greater diversity of plants, it is simply more difficult for the disease to spread.

"There's been quite a push by the agrotech industry to market genetically engineered crops and genetically homogeneous crops that perform really well," said Dr. Shahid Naeem, ecologist at the University of Washington. "But what's really neat about this paper is that it shows how we've lost sight of the fact that there are some really simple things we can do in the field to manage crops."

Timely Quote: "The time has come to reclaim the stolen harvest and celebrate the growing and giving of good food as the highest gift and the most revolutionary act." - Vandana Shiva

To the Great Genius of Wildmeister Viktor Schauberger, Modern Pioneer of our Understanding of Water & Natural Living Energies in Gaia, II

2005-02-07T03:48:00.000-08:00

To the Great Genius of Wildmeister Viktor Schauberger, Modern Pioneer of our Understanding of Water and Natural Living Energies in Gaia, the Mother Planet, a Living Organism – II

Viktor Schauberger, the Water-wizard from Austria.

Introduction

For a long time I have been interested in environmental subjects and new technique, which is co-operating with nature instead of against it. This is how I came in contact with Viktor Schauberger´s ideas and work. The reason why I got so interested was a book "Living Water" written by the Swedish author Olof Alexandersson. As this book is very well written and contains a good brief on Viktor Schauberger, his ideas and work, I strongly recommend it to everybody that takes an interest in these subjects.

After reading this book I felt very strongly that I needed to know more. After some problems with Implonik-Information I managed to get in contact with the author himself. From Olof Alexandersson I had some interesting material; later on I also had some more heavier mathematical/technical material that might be able after some time.

The material in the following articles is authentic and has been taken from the paper IMPLOSION and then translated into Swedish by O. A. IMPLOSION was published for the first time in 1961, laid down in 1990, but recently started again. If anyone would like to subscribe (only available on German, sadly enough) You can write to: Verein für Implosionsforschung und Anvendunge e. V. , Windschläger Str. 58, 77652 Offenburg, Deutschland.

I have selected one of these articles to be the introduction article because that I think it is easy to understand and that it gives an interesting view of the work and ideas of V.S. Because of my own incomplete knowledge of V.S., I cannot promise to answer questions, BUT I welcome any contacts. If you would like some more material than available here, I recommend "Living Water" and "Living Energies" by Callum Coats.

Books of interest: "The Living Water, Author: Olof Alexandersson Publisher: Gateway books .

Our environment is in danger

The air, the water, the earth are going to be wasted. The damages can be seen everywhere. Contamination, poisoning, plundering of the earth’s raw materials, everything breaks down the life-processes and destroy the energy sources. Our forests are dying; the food that we are eating is being destroyed. The quality of our lives is decreasing. This we can see daily, this is a fact well known to everybody even to those who themselves are "vampirising" nature and to the scientists who are "thinking one octave to low" regarding the natures way of functioning and who do not see the large energy-crises that are emerging.

"A new way of feeling for the nature is now beginning to emerge. This demands new scientific methods. Actually there is already a tradition on this subject even though it has been living as a subculture and has been considered as something ridiculous wherever or whenever it has popped up. This is where Viktor Schauberger has his place. It is about time that we see what useful things we can find even among the marginal and the heretic." Declared Dr Kerstin Anér, former Swedish Secretary of State, about the political responsibility of science, advocating considering the views of Schauberger as being central to the creation of a new global picture, focusing on co-operation with nature.

"The book is a flaming appeal, a cry so that we will wake up from our technical daydreams" P. A. Atterbom, from the Swedish paper "Hunting-grounds and Fishing Waters.

Written by Jens Landgré translated by Curt Hallberg

To the Great Genius of Wildmeister Viktor Schauberger, Modern Pioneer of our Understanding of the Role & Ecology of Water & Natural Living Energies, I

2005-02-07T03:09:00.000-08:00

To the Great Genius of Wildmeister Viktor Schauberger, Modern Pioneer of our Understanding of Water and Natural Living Energies Gaia, the Mother Planet, as a Living Organism - I

Landscape healer and inventor of environment-friendly technology, Viktor Schauberger vividly described how our disdain for Nature's ways will bring only environmental catastrophe. His vision - humanity working within Nature's laws - is the path we must rediscover, if we are to survive. By Alick Bartholomew, Promoting the rediscovery of Schauberger's work for over 22 years, Alick has worked closely with author Callum Coats ("Living Energies"), commissioning and publishing six books about Schauberger's research, and has now written a book of his own, "Hidden Nature", Published by Floris Books. Promoting the rediscovery of Schauberger's work for over 22 years, Alick has worked closely with author Callum Coats ("Living Energies"), commissioning and publishing six books about Schauberger's research, and has now written a book of his own, "Hidden Nature", Published by Floris Books.

Viktor Schauberger (1885 - 1958) was a natural scientist whose ideas were way ahead of the time. As a young man he worked as a 'forest-master' in the Austrian Alps when they were still a true wilderness. His remarkable observations of Nature-in-the-raw were to influence his entire life's work. Schauberger's insights into Nature's ways pivoted around the essential characteristics of water as a living substance that energises all life, both organic and inorganic. He frequently asserted "water is a living organism" - an idea to which poets and philosophers have subscribed, but which has escaped conventional science. He was passionate about trees, and natural forests as the cradle of water. He warned how deforestation would deplete the world of water and destroy fertility, causing deserts and climatic chaos. He argued that when the natural eco-systems are in balance and diversity rules, there is great creativity and the evolution of higher and more complex life forms, but there is also order and stability. When humanity walked lightly on the Earth, we cooperated with Nature. Although we are still part of Nature, we behave as though we are not, but above it, dominating and exploiting it. Viktor warned that the more we continued to go against Nature, the whole eco-system would become sick, the climate destructive, and human society would break down, with extreme violence, greed and pandemic illnesses. "How else should it be done", he was asked. His answer was straightforward and uncompromising -- "Exactly in the opposite way that it is done today!" Viktor Schauberger's discovery of the enormous energy potential contained in living water led him to develop the technology of implosion (the opposite to explosion) with radical new forms of propulsion and an appliance that converted lifeless water into healing water with the vitality of a mountain spring. His insights about vortex energy and implosion have made possible the development of a new range of products that give us sustainable and healing energy, and show the way to healing our environment.

Victor Schauberger's Bio

1885 Viktor Schauberger born in Holzschlag, Upper Austria, into a family with a long tradition of caring for the unspoilt Alpine forests.

1914-18 Soon after the birth of his son Walter, Viktor was enlisted in the Kaiser's army.

1919 Appointed forest warden and gamekeeper.

1920 Became head warden ('forst meister') in Brunnenthall-Steyerling, the property of Prince Adolph van Schaumburg-Lippe.

1922 Radical designs of new log flume at Steyerling, which greatly reduced cost of bringing trees out of inaccessible mountains, with no damage to the timber.

1924-28 National consultant for timber flotation, building successful flumes in Austria, Bavaria and Yugoslavia.

1929 First patent applications for water engineering and turbines. This was a very creative time, and for the next few years he did a lot of writing.
1930-32 Experiments with producing electrical energy directly from water, converting degraded into pure water and the prototype of the 'trout turbine' based on his observations of a trout's behaviour in a fast flowing stream. Study of comparative agricultural methods in Bulgaria, sanctioned by King Boris.

1933 Publication of his only book, Unsere Sinnlose Arbeit "Our Senseless Toil - The Cause of the World Crisis"; subtitled 'Growth through Transformation, not Destruction, of the Atom'. Meeting with Hitler to discuss Viktor's ideas about power generation and agricultural methods.

1936-7 Arnold Hohl made detailed records of his visits to Viktor Schauberger, with contemporary writings, letters, notes and comments which were published in 1993 in a special edition of Mensch und Technik - naturmass (Humanity & Technology - in accordance with Nature).

1938 Constructs with his son Walter a replica of Lord Kelvin's Falling Water Experiment of capillary research, generating a voltage of 20,000 volts.

1940 The first Repulsine (flying saucer) built first in Berlin and then in Vienna, where the prototype broke from its mooring and smashed through the factory's ceiling. Heinkel steals Viktor's copyright and builds his Schriever 'Flying Top' in his Rostock factory.

1943 Himmler gives the SS the task of producing secret weapons. Viktor gets sucked into the Nazi machine against his will.

1944 Schauberger drafted into the SS and ordered (on pain of death) to develop an improved Repulsine and a submarine engine for Germany's war effort, at the Mathausen concentration camp. All prototypes and working models of the Repulsine subsequently ordered by Field Marshall Keitel to be destroyed on the collapse of the German armies.

1945 Invading Russian intelligence team removes Viktor's research papers and his models from his Vienna flat. Held for a month in 'protective custody' by American forces in Austria who decided he was not to be deported to the USA, as were countless other German atomic scientists, engineers and physicists. Viktor starts work on his Klimator, for domestic air conditioning.

1945-50 Focuses on research to increase soil fertility and agricultural production.

1950 Patent application for his radical 'golden plough'. Viktor's son Walter invited by St. Barbe Baker to go on a top universities lecture tour in England. British scientists impressed, but admitted to St. Barbe afterwards that, though his implosion theories were unchallengeable, their adoption would mean 'rewriting all the textbooks in the world'.

1952 The experiments carried out at the Department of Hygiene at the Stuttgart University of Technology by Prof. Franz Pöpel, on the investigation of friction in helicoids pipes with various forms of wall structure. This independent investigation was to vindicate Viktor's theories of how to reduce (even to a negative value) the friction of liquids in pipes.

1956 A Canadian aerospace company offers to buy a propulsion system for their Avrocar disc from Schauberger, which he declined because it was likely to be used for military purposes. Another offer of $3 million by an American company he turned down for the same reason.

1958 In April, Viktor agrees go with his son Walter to Texas to develop radical power technology with an American consortium. Disagreement ensues as to the purpose of the research, and after refusing to cooperate, they were allowed to go home only on condition that Viktor surrendered to the Consortium all his patents past, present and future. Viktor dies, a desolate man, five days after returning home.

1966 Dr. Evgeny Podkletnov, a Russian scientist admits to Jane's Defence Weekly editor that his father was given Schauberger's papers, from which he was able to develop an anti-gravity device which, in 2002, was introduced into the Boeing Aerospace program.

To the Great Genius of Dr Helan JAWORSKI, Modern Pioneer of our Understanding of the Gaeon [Gaia, the Mother Planet], as a Living Organism

2005-02-07T01:53:00.000-08:00

In memoriam, to the Great Genius of Dr Helan JAWORSKI

Modern Pioneer of our Understanding of the Gaeon [Gaia, the Mother Planet], as a Living Organism, and of the Essential Interconnectedness of All That Lives

By Count Maurice MAETERLINCK, Nobel Laureate

SaveGaia (then "Sauver la Terre") "Honors Committee" Member,

as entrusted to our Founder Andre Birre in the 1940's

[Original translation by Alexander TEIXEIRA de MATTOS,

revised & augmented by Dr Francis ANNENBERG]

MACROCOSM and MICROCOSM

1
The biologists tell us that the human embryo repeats, very rapidly during the early months of its development and more slowly during the later months, all the forms of life which preceded man upon this earth.

The round speck which is the germ becomes a hollow sphere, a sort of sac with a double wall, which is known as the gastrula and whose orifice of invagination, when it closes, receives the name of the blastopore. This is protozoic life, the as yet gelatinous beginning of animal life, and is followed, after transformations that would take too long to enumerate, by polypoid life.

Next, on either side of the head, appear the branchial arches, corresponding with the gills of the fish. At the end of the first month, the limbs are still no more than mere buds; on the other hand, the embryo is provided with a tail, which, folded against the body, nearly touches the forehead. It now has the appearance of a tadpole and lives a life which is wholly aquatic, bathed in the amniotic fluid which represents for it the water in which the embryos of fish and frogs move about freely.

It now becomes a matter of forming a resolution and knowing what to do with it. The embryo is almost in the situation occupied by life at the origin of the species; and nature, as though to humiliate man or to humiliate herself by remembering her mistakes and hesitations, returns to her gropings, her asymmetrics, her repentances, her unsuccessful experiments. Tentative forms, such as the dorsal cord, are reabsorbed; the primitive kidneys disappear, to make room for the final kidneys, which are enormous, filling the greater portion of the peritoneal cavity.

Enormous too is the liver, which invades almost the whole of the visceral cavity; enormous the head, almost as large as the rest of the body; and in this enormous head the primitive ocular vesicles are formed, themselves enormous, as is the umbilical vesicle. This is the incoherent and monstrous period corresponding with the period of madness and gigantism when nature, as yet inexperienced, was blindly sketching uncertain creatures, formidable, unbalanced and anomalous, birds, crocodiles, elephants and fish in one, as though she had not as yet decided what to do, not yet completed her classifications, disentangled her laws, or acquired the sense of proportion, of balance, or of conditions essential to the maintenance of the life which she was creating.

2
This, roughly speaking, is the recapitulation which occurs before our eyes, but of which, no doubt, many incidents escape us or do not sufficiently attract our attention, for it is possible that they reproduce types with which we are not acquainted and which have not even left geological traces, seeing that the number of species which have disappeared is infinitely greater than that of the species which we know.

Dr. Helan Jaworski, in his description of the Gaeon – Gaia, our Mother Planet, may therefore very justly assert that the embryonic period corresponds with the geological period. And, even as, in the great terrestrial evolution, we observe the gradual disappearance of the armour-plated fishes, the monstrous reptiles and the gigantic mammals, so, in the minor embryonic evolution, we see the primitive kidney, the dorsal cord and the umbilical vesicle dissolve, while the liver diminishes and the disproportion between the head and the rest of the body is lessened. In a word, nature is learning wisdom, recognizing her errors, profiting by her experience, doing her best to repair her blunders and acquiring a sense of equilibrium, economy and form.

Dr. Jaworski finds other analogies between the geological period corresponding with man's appearance upon earth and the birth of the child, analogies which are ingenious, but perhaps more hazardous. Birth is in fact preceded by a miniature deluge, caused by the tearing of the foetal envelopes, which allow the amniotic fluid to escape. Then the child, at the moment of entering into life, suddenly experiences a sort of glacial period; it passes, in fact, from an environment with a temperature of over 98° to the outer air, which is barely 60° or 65°. The sense of cold is so terrible that it wrests a first cry of suffering from the new-born child.

3
What is the meaning of this strange recapitulation?

Dr. Jaworski thought that, if the brief process of embryonic evolution which prepares the way for the birth of man repeats the great process of terrestrial evolution, this latter, on its side, might well be but a vast embryonic period that is preparing for a birth which we cannot as yet envision. When Dr Jaworski wrote his seminal book, it was hard to know whether he would succeed in maintaining this remarkable theory. If he did, he really made us, as he promised to do, "take a step towards the very essence of things." Thanks to his relentless studies, his vision and his great genius, he truly made us take another and very useful step towards a truth which this time is incontestable, which, though less unexpected, has never been elucidated with so much patience and which is no less big with consequences.

4
Dr. Jaworski, then, undertakes to demonstrate that the human body unites in itself, in a plainly recognizable form, all the living creatures which now exist upon earth and which have existed since the origin of life. In other words, each creature sums up in itself all those which have preceded it; and humanity, the last-comer, contains within each of its individual components the whole biological tree, so much so that, if we could distribute the human body, if we could segregate each of its organs and keep it alive in isolation, we should be able to reconstitute all existing forms, to repeople the earth with all the species which it has borne, from the primitive protoplasm to the synthesis, the final achievement, humanity itself.

We might perhaps go farther than Dr. Jaworski and declare, with the wise men of the East, that we likewise contain within us, in the germ or in a rough-hewn state, all the creatures and all the forms that will come after us. But here we should be leaving the domain of science proper to lose ourselves in a speculation which by its very nature might not yet be capable of verification.

5
So it is not merely in a figurative sense, such as that foreshadowed by the current idiom, where it speaks of the vascular tree, the branches of nerves, or the ovarian cluster; it is not merely by analogy, but in a literal and strictly scientific sense that our heart, fundamentally, is nothing but a medusa and our kidneys sponges, that our intestines represent the polyps and our skeleton the polypites, that our reproductive organs are worms or molluscs, that the vertebral column and the spinal marrow take the place of the Echinodermata, while the Brachiopoda and the Ctenophora would be derived from our eye and the reptiles found in our digestive apparatus, the birds in our respiratory organs and, so on.
I repeat, there is no question here of metaphors or of more or less approximate, elastic and plausible correspondences but of rigorously and meticulously established proofs.

I cannot, of course, set before you the details of Dr. Jaworski's exegesis. It would not permit of the slightest solution of continuity and, in all the volumes published, it leads us to conclusions which are very difficult to contest. People used to assert, without attaching too much faith to what they said or scrutinizing it too closely, that man is a microcosm. It seems to be clearly proved to-day that this is not merely literally defensible, but scientifically accurate. We are a prehistoric colony, immense and innumerous, a living agglomeration of all that lives, has lived and probably will live upon earth. We are not only the sons or brothers of the worms, the reptiles, the fish, the frogs, the birds, the mammals and no matter what monsters have defiled or affrighted the surface of the globe: we bear them within us; our organs are no other than themselves -- We nourish all their types; they are only awaiting an opportunity to escape from us, to reappear, to reconstitute themselves, to develop and to plunge us once again into terror. In this respect, quite as much as in respect of the secret thoughts, the vices and the phantoms with which we are filled, we might repeat the words which Emerson's old man used to speak to his children, when they were frightened by a strange face in the dark passage:

"Children, you will never see anything worse than yourselves!"

If all the species were to disappear and only man remained, none would be lost and all might be reborn of his body, as though they were coming out of Noah's ark, from the almost invisible protozoa down to the formidable antediluvian colossi which could lick the roofs of our houses.

It is therefore fairly probable that all these species take part in our existence, in our instincts, in all our feelings, in all our thoughts; and here once more we are led back to the great religions of India, which foresaw all the truths that we are gradually discovering and which already, thousands of years ago, were telling us that man is everything and that he must recognize his essence in every living creature.

A BIT OF HISTORY...

2005-02-06T14:35:00.000-08:00

SAVEGAIA was created on September 4th, 1964 as a division of the "Organization for the Service of Life" headed by French ecologist and environmentalist Andre BIRRE, author of the seminal work "Humus, Health & Wealth of the Earth", and became an autonomous entity exactly ten years later, on September 4th, 1974.

The Organizational Committee counted Andre Birre (President), Andre Voisin, Jean Pain, Hans von Reichmann, Francis Annenberg (Secretary). The "Honors Committee", among others, John Lilly, Carl-Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Viktor Frankl, Otto Warburg, Pierre Boyer de Latour, Henri Desjonqueres, Pierre Masquelier, Johanna Budwig, and (in memoriam) Dr Helan Jaworski and Wildmeister Viktor Schauberger.

More to come...

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WELCOME!

2005-02-06T14:16:00.000-08:00

This is the "Home Blogpage" for the SaveGaia International Foundation & for SaveGaiaNow, a "non governmental organization" dedicated to saving the planet for a sustainable future and the harmonious cohabitation & mutual benefit of all planetary life -- Plant, Animal and Human.

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