truthspeaker
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Ok, big picture
Europe has insufficient resources to maintain its complexity/consumption, and is trying to solve this problem with more complexity, but without the resource to fund it, hence austerity to use remaining resources for additional complexity. This manifests as existing structures using more resources to sustain themselves at the expense of the overall system. Like an organ shutting down to continue feeding the brain or heart of a starving person.
Its a simple situation, when people go hungry, they will tear everything apart, and it will be a case of who survives the food scarcity afterwards.
If everyone grew their own food, there wouldnt be a problem anywhere.
Pardon my simplified understanding of the EU situation, but isnt it a case of a complex society not having enough energy to support the complexity, and tryimg to solve this problem with more complexity, which creates the completely dreamlike situation we are in with greece and others?
My solution would be to start farming again, make sure everyone can eat, then see how much is left over for complex activities.
My view is that the ‘Industrial system’ will collapse, not the species. All the worlds indigenous tribes will carry on, as will peasant farmers the world over. Fossil fuels have messed us up, and the non-stop peddling of a life of constant leisure is because of fossil fuels and the energy they give. Previous solar civilisations did not have this problem, as they simply didnt have the surplus energy.
I think in an industrialised or post industrialised country it will be a case of a) voluntarily or involuntarily reducing consumption – we can see that happening now with job losses and bankruptcies, and b)finding a way to replace imported food with local, in a scalable and equitable manner.
In response to peak oil, i have changed my lifestyle to reduce energy consumption, through prioritising whats really necessary in life, without making myself an outcast (if such a thing is possible).
I have read extensively about this topic, and i believe it is real and very serious, not thinking about it is simply a way to avoid the emotional tsunami that hits you as you go unravel the complexity humans have created using fossil fuels.
I’ve taken action. Over a course of 6-7 weekends i went to my local coffee shop and took their waste coffee grounds and accumulated around 300kg of it in plastic tubs. I then innoculated it with about £100/$200 of oyster mushroom spawn. It can take months for it to colonise, depending on size, but you get about 10% minimum of the total weight in mushrooms. This ‘farm’ is in a concrete garden and takes about 3metres of land area. The tubs are stacked vertically.
I see it like this, if i now have a steady stream of mushrooms, suppose 30kg a year, i will have over 2kg a month, which is more than enough to nutrify me and my immediate family in case of a crisis. I can keep growing it, as long as the earth exists, as i can use leaves or seaweed to expand my mushroom production base.
There are all these people talking about the same issue, we know food is going to go up, we know oil is going to go up, we know that a lot of people wont cope in that circumstance, but where is the action? Its been nearly four years since the 2008 spike, if people, particulary the informed minority are not ready by now, then how on earth is anyone going to survive?
Its time for action – Oyster mushrooms, Nettles and others are very versatile, robust and can be grown vertically, i see no other realistic solution for local food in urban or rural areas beyond vertical farming, couple with a waste clean up effort using oyster mushrooms.
If nature intends to clean house, i’d rather be surfing the wave than sitting on the beach trying to build a castle in the sand.
PLEASE LISTEN – INDUSTRIAL HEMP is a plant that could solve food problems, domestic heating issues, soil issues, health issues and economic/social issues. This plant has been suppressed and ignored, and all humanity has suffered for it. in my opinion, industrial hemp is not a liquid fuel substitute, but could help a great deal in feeding people basic nutrition and adding to a diversified resource base. What would happen if a million people grew an acre each of industrial hemp? there would be plenty of food and work to do, i believe we have a problem with cheap food and unemployment at the moment, how come something so easy isnt done????
SECOND, PLEASE LISTEN – The oyster mushroom (Pleurotus Ostreatus) grows on virtually any dead organic matter, in any temperature above freezing, in any manner of storage facility. I give an example – I have gathered 300kg’s of used coffee grounds from local coffee stores, used a small amount of spawn to innoculate the coffee, and get around 10% yield on each tub of coffee i have. On 300kg, that means i can get 30kg of mushrooms per year, which in a collapse scenario, keeps me and family alive, or in a decline/transition scenario, gives me fresh nutrition and expands my spawn base to give exponential expansion without further investment.
This is just a layman, and i can think of a way to generate a significant amount of fresh food from a small concrete garden in the UK. I also happen to live by the sea, so i can use kelp and drift as mushroom substrate. This is genuine closed loop food production. If a million people did this, we would have a major change, imagine if a million people had ideas better than this, and took action? the outlook would change immensely for the better.
There is plenty of land, there is plenty of waste that can be converted to food, there is still time to do it.
