Richard Maybury on the Collapse of the Anglo-American Empire and What It Means for You. Backyard Food Production -How Much Land Does it Take? When thinking of becoming self-reliant, the question arises "how much land do I need to be able to sustainably grow enough food for my family? " The exact answer to that question depends on several factors, but you can learn a lot, and make a pretty good estimate, by looking at some scenarios that span the various alternatives.
Let’s start first off with the almost magical dream of the pure hunter/gatherer. I often hear this one from those concerned about a collapse of civilization. The shit hits the fan and you take your rifle and a few supplies and head out to the wilderness to live off the land. Since there are so few actual hunter/gathers left alive on the planet, and the few places where they do still exist tend to be jungles which look nothing like anything in , we will turn to anthropological data.
OK, so you won't be going that primitive. The research to the answer to that question was started back in the 70's by a very forward thinking man named John Jeavons. Cheers, Riverwalker. How Much Land Does a Man Need? "How Much Land Does a Man Require? " (Russian: Много ли человеку земли нужно?
, Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno) is an 1886 short story by Leo Tolstoy about a man who, in his lust for land, forfeits everything. Synopsis[edit] The protagonist of the story is a peasant named Pahom, who overhears his wife and sister-in-law argue over the merits of town and peasant farm life. He thinks to himself "if I had plenty of land, I shouldn't fear the Devil himself! ". Unbeknownst to him, Satan is present sitting behind the stove and listening. Satan abruptly accepts his challenge and also tells that he would give Pahom more land and then snatch everything from him.
He stays out as late as possible, marking out land until just before the sun sets. Cultural influence[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] What Men Live By and Other Tales at Project Gutenberg - a collection including How Much Land Does a Man Need? World land area / world population. Backyard Food Production Library Store - How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine. What Does 200 Calories Cost? The Economics of Obesity.
(Update: I thought this popular article would be worth bumping back up due my #BelowTheLine eating challenge. There have been some good comments about the fact that caloric content does not equate to nutrition. Very true, I am actually planning to buy relatively little of the “cheap” junk food items on this list like donuts, white bread, chips, and candy. Instead, I’m buying rice, lentils, beans, eggs, and a few fruits. The economics of obesity should also acknowledge the important factors of convenience and taste. Fast food tastes good and arrives instantly. I have to soak my dry lentils and beans and cook them for over an hour. Planning ahead can save a lot of money, but it’s not clear how to convince more people to do so.) WiseGeek has an interesting article on What Does 200 Calories Look Like? I thought it would be neat to extend this idea and see what 200 calories costs. We Are Getting Fat You can really see the differences in prices as you go down the tables.
The 2% : Casaubon's Book. Michael Ableman has written a lovely manifesto from the 2% - the tiny percentage of Americans who actually farm: There are far more people in prison than growing our food, more stockbrokers and lawyers than those of us who feed our neighbors. We are the 2 percent we call farmers. There is nothing more central to our lives than how we secure our food. Yet the responsibility for this has been almost entirely handed over to someone somewhere else, to an industrial system where farms have become factories and food has become a faceless commodity. The results have been disastrous; epidemic levels of childhood obesity and diabetes, food that no longer tastes good or is good for you, polluted groundwater, soil loss at staggering rates, and most profound; an almost complete disconnection from the social, cultural, and ecological relationships that were once part of agrarian life.
Why are so many Americans in prison? - Inside Story Americas. The US has the highest prison population in the world - some of whom have been subjected to lengthy sentences for relatively minor crimes. And that population has surged over the past three decades. Although there has been a slight reduction in the past year, more than two million people are either incarcerated in prison or in jail awaiting trial. The US has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, with 743 people incarcerated for every 100,000 Americans. No other nation even comes close to these figures. One explanation for the boom in the prison population is the mandatory sentencing imposed for drug offences and the "tough on crime" attitude that has prevailed since the 1980s. But it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes US prison policy. These long sentences are leading to an ageing prison population - with eight per cent of prisoners now over the age of 55. A black male is seven times more likely to be imprisoned than a white male.
Taming the Zoning Monster : Casaubon's Book. For the last several years I’ve been working on the invention of “Urban and Suburban Right-to-Farm Laws” and have had some notable successes including a legal conference on the idea and a few municipalities that have implemented them. This is one of the reasons I think this is so incredibly important – zoning presumptions simply can’t be allowed to prevent people from using less and meeting their own needs. Over the last 50 years, food and zoning laws have worked to minimize subsistence activities in populated areas. Not only have we lost the culture of subsistence, but we’ve instituted legal requirements that make it almost impossible for many people to engage in simple subsistence activities that cut their energy use, reduce their ecological impact, improve their food security and improve their communities.
In some cases, these laws were instituted for fairly good reasons, in many cases, for bad ones that associate such activities with poverty. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Coping with Unlimited. ‘Unlimited’ is a funny thing. It’s something that can be harmful — say, if we have the ability to produce an unlimited number of paper cups…where would they all go after they’ve been used? — but generally it’s something we try to pursue, especially in situations where we have the option of unlimited without the trash-heap downside that can come tandem (I’m looking at you, Industrial Revolution).
If you consider information and the way it’s stored, transmitted and consumed today, you’ll realize that we are able to create and distribute a nearly unlimited amount of knowledge to every part of the globe. There are still some choke points that require more hardware-muscle, but in general, if the knowledge exists, it can be made available and consumed for the price of nearly nothing. That is our capability, anyway. These people can’t really be blamed for pining after the days where one required a Xerox machine and a lot of time to copy a book they owned the rights to.
‘All available copies.’ Grocery Shopping With Your Middle Finger. The Grocery Store is the only retail establishment that I visit more than once a month. But even then, we have a bit of a love/hate relationship. I Love the grocery store, because it is the source of almost all of my food. Under its roof lies a world of unlimited possibilities. It can help me cook up almost any recipe on Earth, and by selecting the right foods and avoiding the wrong ones, I can ensure a fantastic level of health for myself and my family.
But I also Hate the grocery store occasionally, because about 90% of the products in there are pure crap. Colorful boxes and disposable plastic packages containing mostly ridiculous chemicals, colors, and artificial flavors, all mixed over a base of high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oil, and refined white flour. The grocery store also earns my rage with its ever-tricky pricing scheme. At least you can take comfort that some prices are always stable. So what’s a Mustachian to do in a situation like this? * Mr. Lab-Grown Burger To Be Served In Six Months. Muscle cells taken from a cow are placed in a special nutrient mixture that promotes growth.
Researchers hope to combine the cultured tissue into a hamburger sometime this fall. A number of laboratories around the world are trying to grow meat in a Petri dish. So far we’ve heard about clumps of cells grown from stem cells with the hope that those cells will one day grow into a full-sized, grill-ready chicken fillet or hamburger. Now one researcher says the time to fire up the propane is fast approaching. Did you say you wanted cheese on that?
Post made the announcement a few weeks ago at the annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver. Cultured meat begins with muscle cells taken from the rear of a cow for sirloin steak, for instance, or from the area surrounding a pig’s spine for growing pork chops. But when we do, we may find ourselves at the start of a food revolution. Late last year the Earth’s population reached 7 billion. Case for Zero Waste. "Although unheard of a decade ago, there is considerable recent interest in designing industrial production processes that produce zero waste…the goal is a worthy motivator. " Kenneth Geiser, Materials Matter Waste causes great loss of value and resources. Humans are the only species that create waste. We can learn to identify all types of waste and through their elimination, save money and achieve a more sustainable world.
Zero Waste - What is it all about? The visionary goal of Zero Waste expresses the need for a closed-loop industrial/societal system as suggested in Figure 1. Figure 1. Zero waste suggests that the entire concept of waste should be eliminated. Zero Waste strategies consider the entire life-cycle of our products, processes and systems in the context of a comprehensive systems understanding of our interactions with nature and search for inefficiencies at all stages. The comprehensive nature of a Zero Waste Strategy is shown in the following input-output diagram: Figure 2. Environmental Group Breaks the Silence on Population Control. Getting ready for the end of growth on Earth. Long Beach, California—Paul Gilding wants to scare us. He wants to scare us into acting before it's too late. "The Earth is Full. Full of us, full of our stuff. Full of our waste," he said during his TED talk. In financial terms, we live on the Earth like we are spending 50 percent more than we earn.
Gilding has been agitating for sustainability long before most people became aware of the concept, and he has a bleak message for the prospects of the free market. Our economy is not sustainable, and woefully unprepared for hitting the Earth's limits. But humanity has a tendency to think it is only getting started. "The idea that we can smooth these transitions" through economic difficulties so that "9 billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads," he said, is "dangerously wrong.
" "The most important issue we face is how we respond," Gilding notes. Yet our national dialogue is fixated on gas prices. And this is where Gilding saw the value of fear. The end of oil is closer than you think | Science. The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that the second Great Depression may be round the corner. But last week, a group of ultra-conservative Swiss financiers asked a retired English petroleum geologist living in Ireland to tell them about the beginning of the end of the oil age. They called Colin Campbell, who helped to found the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre because he is an industry man through and through, has no financial agenda and has spent most of a lifetime on the front line of oil exploration on three continents.
He was chief geologist for Amoco, a vice-president of Fina, and has worked for BP, Texaco, Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon in a dozen different countries. "Don't worry about oil running out; it won't for very many years," the Oxford PhD told the bankers in a message that he will repeat to businessmen, academics and investment analysts at a conference in Edinburgh next week. "We should be worried. Crude alternatives Heavy oils Tar sands. How to Make Trillions of Dollars. Before I get into it, I must say that I don’t recommend that you do this. I’m sharing this strategy for information purposes only, so that you can understand the playing field you’re working with, and can make better personal choices for how you make and manage your money. I do encourage you to become a millionaire, if that’s something that interests you.
If it’s billions you’re after, I’m a bit suspicious but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Aspiring to trillions, though, is the domain of the wicked alone and we won’t be able to be friends any more. The big money isn’t in creating products, it’s in creating customers. You can make millions by selling a great product to people who need it, but you make billions and trillions by conditioning an entire nation of people to react to every inconvenience, every whim, and every passing desire or fear by buying something. It does take some capital to get it going. What it takes amounts to an engineered cultural shift.
Creativity. A Formula for Success: The Power of Implementation Intentions. Sacred Economics: Why our money economy doesn’t work anymore. Malthus.pdf (application/pdf Object)