Green Your Head

Why Green Your Head?

Why green your head? Because the first requirement of sustainability is to change how we think. We must start by abandoning our fantasies of unlimited growth. Technology can help us, but only if we are conscious of technology's limits. Great life, like great art, only flourishes within constraints. 

Backyard Biochar Kiln Instructions

I made up this sheet of instructions for the kiln for the Illinois Valley Farm and Garden Festival last fall. Just now getting them up here. I hope they are helpful.Download Backyard_biochar_kiln_instructions

Heritage High School builds the biochar kiln

We got a fun letter the other day at IBI from a teacher, Darlyn Wendlandt, who had her students build and fire the biochar kiln that I have documented on this site. It was hard for me to get all the materials together and build the kiln, so I am very impressed at what these high school students have done. The welding class did the welding work.

Here is a video of the test firing. And the cookie-eating!

21st century farmer comes full circle

This summer we grew a crop of oats - just a few rows as cover crop between our vegetable beds. Today I stripped the seed from the straw so I could use the oat straw for tea and save the seeds for next year's oats. I store the seed in the basement and need to protect if from the mice. I thought it would be ideal to have a sack that I could hang from the ceiling. But where to find a cloth sack?

An old pillow case! I have several that are stained or frayed or just don't match the sheets I use. A linen pillow case to store my grain is really coming full circle from the days when thrifty housewives used coarse flour sacks to make all kinds of household linens and even clothing.

Where would I even find a sack for flour or grain these days? I'd have to make it myself, or even better, pick up a pile of old pillow cases at the Goodwill.

Report: Contraception cheapest way to combat climate change

 A team of British researchers found that it's almost five times cheaper to reduce carbon emissions by encouraging contraception and family planning than it is to invest in green technologies. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?blogid=46&entry_id=47265

Yep. Just what I've been saying for years. Maybe we can use carbon credits to buy condoms and pills -- or develop new, better methods.

My presentation at North American Biochar conference

The North American Biochar conference was held in Boulder, Colorado from Aug 9-12. A very productive couple of days - it was wonderful to connect names from the far flung biochar community to actual faces!

Below is my contribution to the conference. Mostly it's a report on discussions at the Josephine County Renewable Energy Task Force about biochar.

Backyard Biochar

We have been having a lot of fun making charcoal. Checkout my slideshow:

re-re-thinking nukes

James Hansen got me to re-think nuclear power in light of climate change. I read up on Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) and corresponded with some of the enthusiasts. What they said sounded good - but doesn't it always? The most appealing selling point for these reactors was the possibility of using them to help reduce the lethality of existing nuclear waste. Luckily, Energy Bulletin pointed me to this article by Amory Lovins that delves into the topic from a different, but informed view. Still, I don't know which is worse for the planet, nuclear catastrophe or the carbon bomb that could kill the oceans for millions of years.

"New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story
By Amory B. Lovins

IFRs are often claimed to “burn up nuclear waste” and make its “time of concern . . . less than 500 years” rather than 10,000–100,000 years or more. That’s wrong: most of the radioactivity comes from fission products, including very-long-lived isotopes like iodine-129 and technicium-99, and their mix is broadly similar in any nuclear fuel cycle. IFRs’ wastes may contain less transuranics, but at prohibitive cost and with worse occupational exposures, routine releases, accident and terrorism risks, proliferation, and disposal needs for intermediate- and low-level wastes.

Malthus and Vice

It's taken me awhile to get this up, but here's my latest published piece:

http://www.alternet.org/environment/135518/have_we_hit_the_limits_of_human_population/

It's also at Energy Bulletin under my original title, Malthus and Vice.

Have We Hit the Limits of Human Population?

By Kelpie Wilson, AlterNet. Posted April 10, 2009.

Without growth, there would be no economy as we know it. But modern culture, by and large, doesn't see that it can exist only in the medium of ceaseless growth and expansion, because a fish doesn't see the water it swims in. Only today, in the recent, breathless moments of the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression, do we begin to perceive the waters around us.

Slowly, we are coming to realize that the last 200 years of economic growth have been based on a monumental Ponzi scheme that has pushed the final reckoning ever forward in time, until the future is now. Slowly, we are coming to realize that Thomas Malthus was right.

It was the warrior cry of the radical environmental movement in the 1980s: "Malthus Was Right!" But Malthus, a mumbling country parson with intellectual ambitions, had been transmogrified by capitalists and communists alike into a fearsome bogeyman possessed of "dangerous" ideas.

Environmentalists who invoked his name were invariably corrected by their progressive friends, who told them that excess consumption by the rich was the problem, not the reproductive profligacy of the poor.

Yet, as we drive deeper into the greenhouse world, with its crazy weather, water shortages and general degradation, more and more of us from across the political spectrum are wondering how on earth we will feed the 3 billion more people projected to arrive by 2050, or even the 6 billion or so we already have.

Let the Republicans Melt Down and Let's Get On With It

The important New York Times columnists (Krugman, Herbert) are backing a big stimulus bill and warning that what looks likely to pass is not nearly big enough. Furthermore, precious time is being wasted in a futile attempt to court Republicans.

Krugman says:

Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh.

Obama's attention to Republicans is like Dorothy transfixed at the sight of the Wicked Witch as she melts into a puddle of toxic waste. Let them melt down and let's get on with it!

Bob Herbert had a funny story about John McCain:

Senator John McCain echoed many of his Republican colleagues on Friday when he indignantly asserted, “This is not a stimulus bill; it is a spending bill.”

It was an objection that had been addressed by an incredulous President Obama on Thursday night. “What do you think a stimulus is?” the president asked, his voice rising. Spending, he said — to laughter from his audience — “is the whole point.”

Which brings me to an article that illuminates the money mess very well and points to the way out. David Korten in YES says, "Don't fix Wall Street, replace it." Yes! And he has a longer piece in the magazine that outlines a prescription: Beyond the Bailout - Agenda for a New Economy,

This is a very wise analysis covering several points, but the most important one is the idea of completely changing the monetary system. Korten says we must convert to debt free money. Currently, banks create money for businesses and individuals who come in to ask for loans. They have to keep making more loans in order to have enough money coming in to pay interest on their accounts. That locks the whole system into a growth imperative. As Korten puts it: "The demand for repayment with interest of nearly every dollar in circulation virtually assures the economy will fail unless GDP and inequality are constantly growing." Not such a great idea on a finite planet.

The alternative, Korten says, is government issued money with no debt: "government creates debt-free money by spending it into existence to fund public goods like infrastructure or education."

That's your stimulus plan. Clearly $865 billion or whatever it is today is not going to be nearly enough. No wonder the Republicans have their knickers in a knot. The stimulus is the first step in replacing the entire predatory financial system with a new publicly owned and controlled financial system.

There are lots of advantages, says David Korten: "Publicly issued debt-free money would greatly reduce debt, taxes, and environmental harm, be more equitable, and increase financial stability. In a democracy, it should be ours to choose."

I vote for that.

NPR's Crude Trashing of John Maynard Keynes

There's nothing that ticks me off more than economists who pretend that their black art is actually a science. Just because they use math, mainstream economists think we will believe that their equations describe the real world of resources and people that makes up the economy. These wizards who in actuality are nothing but casino managers, are especially concerned that we might switch allegiance to a different brand - communism, or just as bad - Keynesianism!

Last night NPR aired a totally unbalanced piece on John Maynard Keynes that proved beyond all doubt that Republicans and Wall Streeters can't come anywhere near a scientific or even an intellectual argument challenging the man's ideas, so they are left with attacking his personality. NPR commentators Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg charged that Keynes was an elitist, anti-semite, bohemian pottymouth. Why no mention of his homosexuality? Probably because the gay lobby is too powerful and easily riled. Unlike gays, bohemians still don't get any respect. And the anti-semite accusation? Remember, we are talking the 1930s here. You could tar almost any prominent person in that age with all sorts of prejudices that no polite member of society would admit to today. Does that mean that our current economic leading lights are free of all moral taint? Please, don't make us laugh. It hurts too much.

So, after nearly five minutes of simmering in Adam Davidson's ad hominem stew, did we taste any actual refutation of the Keynesian idea that government spending can help revive a stalled economy? No. After admitting that government spending worked pretty well to get us out of the depression and build the post WWII economy, one commentator said that government spending failed to revive a slowing economy in the 1970s. Therefore, Keynesianism has been discredited.

That's it. That one statement was the entire argument against government spending. That and the goofy assertion that "government consumes wealth" and "only the private sector can create wealth."

These two points reveal the two big failures of mainstream economic theory. First, the economic slowdown in the 1970s had much more to do with the rapid rise in energy costs than with government investment. And second, if, as Jimmy Carter wanted, government had spent lavishly on renewable energy, mass transit and energy efficiency, can you imagine how much better off we would be today? Infrastructure is wealth, and only government can create it.

Despite comparing economists to Einstein, as this NPR piece does, mainstream economic theorists are incapable of understanding the real world of physical resources, especially the reality that there are limits to those resources. In their model, the economy is like a carburetor. If it starts to falter, you tinker with the airflow, that is, monetary policy. There's no possibility in your mind that the fuel could run out. You can't admit that the whole machine might be obsolete and it's time to build a new one because there's no way for private industry to accomplish that feat.

Economists hate government, because in a rational economy, there would be no room at the top for the free-for-all gambling casino that makes their class rich. In their eyes, it is the casino that actually generates the wealth because it draws in the money and money is like the air in the carburetor. So when the Fed opened the throttle wide last fall with zero percent interest rates and it failed to stop the stall, then what? Why is it Keynes who is being discredited now?

When their machine models fail, economists will invoke the Invisible Hand. You can model the economy as a machine or you can model it as a body. If it is a body, then private enterprise is the many hands reaching out to grab resources. The hands don't want to be governed, but in a body, the head needs to get involved or the hands will eventually get the body into big trouble. That's what Keynesianism is, in a nutshell - using your head. And that's not science, it's just common sense.