Our First Biochar Class in Texas, (followed closely by a second and third!)

My wife and I recently traveled to Texas, to a little town that is the glazed brick capital of  the U.S., Elgin. Elgin is a wonderful little town that hosts an annual festival called Hogeye Fest. The people are great and friendly, the atmosphere is beautiful and historic, the events are family friendly and showcase local talent. We were hosted by the founders of the first Eco-therapy facility in Texas, Casa De Miel. Their location, in the watershed of the Colorado River was part of our not-for-profit organization's (ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc.'s) long term commitment to the Austin area. Two years ago we were made aware of the need for using biochar in this area by massive floods which inundated the area. Sadly, even though they were called "historic" and "500-year floods", they returned last fall and some are beginning to wonder if these massive flood events are going to be part of a "new normal" for Central Texas. Upon our arrival, on our second trip in the Fall, we were told that they had not had any rain to speak of in Austin, for three months. We drove a round trip of over two thousand miles on our first visit and Nancy and I together added six states to our list of places we have been together.

Our route led through Wisconsin and out of this state at the Southwest corner, into Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and on our return we also saw parts of Arkansas, a different route through Missouri and finally, part of Illinois we had not bee through together before, back through a portion of Iowa we had not seen on the way down and finally, back into Wisconsin and home again. Over 2500 miles and the vast majority of the trip was new to both of us. Spending six days together in the car made me appreciate what a great travel companion Nancy is and it also gave us both great insight into the size of our nation as well as the depth and breadth of poverty that plagues virtually every area of our country. There are of course many beautiful vistas and some, relatively unspoiled parts, but where there has been development in the past, the terrible price of depression and the ultimate effects of extractive policies and practices is quite clear. Seeing our nation threadbare and rent asunder by the plundering invaders frequently made me feel sick.

I brought my entire kit and most of my caboodle for char making on the first trip last February. during that trip we were able to teach about a dozen people, who have more than 250 acres in their care, how to make and use biochar. All of the students we get on these trips have a strong interest in ecological integrity. The most recent classes, in the Fall, were able to teach more than thirty farmers who collectively manage over 1,000 acres! These were mostly market gardeners who seek the moisture retention properties of the biochar. Especially in lands where evaporation is high and rainfall is low, overcoming doughty conditions and reducing the costs associated with irrigation are paramount for them. When I teach people about biochar, typically near the end of the event, I hold out some biochar, cupped in my palm. I tell people, "This is the new black gold." Frequently, I see by their response that they don't quite understand. However, when they are from Texas, they not only understand, but heartily agree.

Little by little...we create change!

During our first trip, we saw homes that should be condemned that still serve as housing. We saw whole cities that once blossomed now reduced to ghost towns. We saw whole regions that have been emptied of their economic activity and that are being left to decay. We saw a town named Hope that seemed to have none left; it looked as if the only hope it ever had left with a young man who hailed from there who became President. We saw another called Preemption which looked from the highway, their main drag, like it may have been better off never having been settled in the first place. We traversed mile after mile in Oklahoma that looked like it would have been beautiful, fecund and rich had it only been left alone and in every part of the trip, existing in pockets in every state that looked like scrapyards rather than home towns, bombed out communities after a war. To say that the citizens of these places are not being served by our current systems of government, education, energy, transportation or the economy would be an understatement. The impoverished are being systematically beaten down. The hand that is crushing them, or the gilded heels of the boots are so large that the edge cannot be seen. The weight of oppression that bears down on them has the force of the unstoppable force against the proverbial immovable object. One city we stopped in for an overnight was barely able to capitalize on the passers-by on the local highway and when we went out to a restaurant for dinner, after washing my hands, they smelled so nasty that I was afraid to eat with them. It was as if the entire aquifer from which they were drawing their water had been contaminated by fungal spores. The people were great, the infrastructure was horrid. Unimaginable potential exists in the people, but they have a negative resource base. Everything of value has been extracted and nothing goes back. The ultra-wealthy have trouble parting with the spoils of their class war.

I don't want this to degrade into a diatribe about poverty and dissolution in America. For the most part, the trip was wonderful, especially the ultimate destination, about twenty-five miles East of Austin. Our hosts are wonderful, their ranch is phenomenal. As not-for-profits go, this place is as good as they can get. Their organization is building community on so many levels and so attentive to their mission that they cannot help but spread healing and recovery to every part of the community they touch. The water was tasty and the weather was great. The only complaint we had during our first trip is that for nine days, we never saw the disc of the Sun. Overcast followed us from Green Bay to Texas and back again, only giving us a brief reprieve from the misty gloom on our last travel day. In addition to making it difficult to get and retain our bearings, it moderated temperatures and provided enough scary road conditions to keep most of the locals off the roads in the colder parts of the drive. Once at the ranch, we were happy to remain grounded on the Earth and to make friends on-site. During our time staying put, we got to know a little about the native wildlife, the menagerie of critters who make their home on the ranch and spent time getting to know our hosts and meeting some of the locals as well. To be so close to a major metropolis and so close to nature was truly a blessing. Everyone we met in our travels seemed to be supremely down to Earth.

We spent several hours talking to the folks who run the ranch about their unique property and a few of the resources on-site and several more hours presenting information about the making and use of biochar with about a dozen local folks who are interested in being better stewards of the properties they own nearby. Part of the message that is contained in our biochar classes is about mimicking nature in our human culture, appreciating one another, reaching out, establishing networks and connections and the diversity we bring to a variety of problems and challenges. Each of these can, in turn, help activate one another and help solve problems or achieve solutions. Just as nature works cooperatively to solve problems, we too need to enlist an intact healthy community in the resolutions of our own, human, difficulties and challenges. As we got to the end of our stay, finishing up the class, our hosts invited us back to present this valuable information again. I'm sure that we will be back many more times, to help spread the word about biochar and re-inspire the folks who came out to these first classes.

When we got home, there was an e-mail waiting from another friend we have not met yet who wants to host a biochar class in Detroit later this Spring. We are anxious to be part of the small organic farm Renaissance that is taking place in that great city. The outreach I do for the classes is limited because I'm not on-site in the location. I like to make contacts in the local organic growers community, reach out to educational and philanthropic foundations and to reach out to local cooperatives and businesses, however when the outreach is just a phone call or e-mail, it is completely different than if I show up in-person and can look them in the eye. There are so many hustlers, players and charlatans, trying to get something that when someone comes who wants to give something back, they often do not know how to react. Seeing more of the community, as I did on my second trip in October exponentially increased both my contact list and effectiveness in setting up future relationships. In some very real ways, I am having to become an unwitting salesman. Interestingly though, over the ten years I have been teaching people this stuff, many have now heard at least something about biochar and that is a very good thing. It seems that the more people know, the more the material sells itself!

We are also requested in the Pacific Northwest this coming Spring to do similar classes and an intensive char-making process for a friend. His acreage is being managed in a principled way far beyond the requirements of "organic certification". I am sure that many more contacts will be made in the coming months/years and that the need for and availability of classes will continue to increase everywhere as people learn more about the benefits that can be had from sequestering carbon for geologic time. I still contend that I can teach anyone interested in this process how to be fully competent to do this in about three to four hours and that if that person is willing to put time into perfecting the approaches to the process as I have, they could become teachers as well. I foresee the need for hundreds, if not thousands of people like me, spreading knowledge about this ancient process far and wide.

We do need to be hyper vigilant about our data. One researcher told me that if we get serious about sequestering atmospheric carbon with biochar, fifteen, gigatons of carbon could be added to agricultural soils in the U.S. alone. I checked his math and he's wrong. His decimal point must have gotten shifted in his calculations or he is using improper application rates. The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) recommends application rates of one metric tome per acre, that puts the amount of potential sequesterable carbon from char at 0.235 gigatons. Even if this material had three times as much organically sequestered carbon living on the surfaces and in the pores of the material, as the char itself represents, we could sequester about one gigaton. Still an improvement, but that alone will not stop global climate destabilization.

When we returned in the fall of 2019, we were armed only with our Power Point and a small retort I made from two stainless steel pots I found at the local second-hand store in Austin. We had ten times as many participants and our sponsoring groups did a great job spreading the word about the classes. We also had much more time on the ground to have personal follow ups with people in the community and that too led us to making excellent in-roads to help make future events even better. We even found a fellow willing to let us use his mixing and bagging facility if we want to do more with commercialized char sales. Several doors were opened into larger institutional fixtures in the Austin area. Groups that honor and respect science and know first hand the pressures being put on the landscapes there. Again, these were ll folks who honor the integrity of natural systems. We continue reaching out through our not-for-profit, ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. to bring techniques for ecological sanity to the Colorado River Watershed. I am sure that our outreach to this area will continue for many, many more years.

Difficulty of the Impoverished

Perhaps when I was very young, things were different. But once I got in grade school, my mom had divorced and we were forever after poor. I remember thinking about the child support payments my father made, he was a good father who paid what he was supposed to in that regard. $82.50 cut in half, because my sister was the reason for the other half. My young mind translated his obligation, no, "responsibility" by working it out using math. My mother was a waitress and so I knew that a decent lunch tip for every day of the month, added up to about the same amount. After all, even at my tender age understood that my dad knew nothing about how to cook for himself. It worked out to $41.25 and I was pretty sure that I ate more food than that every month. Heck, the heat bill was over a hundred dollars a month in winter, so I was worth less than a month's worth of heat. More than two months of my keep, as it were, equaled one month of heat. These truths are not lost on little people, they see the same world we all do, but they have not yet been taught the sanitized lies that get fed to us along the way. Truth, is often more hideous than the lies we are told. This poverty is inescapable, because the tools that are used to survive assure that you cannot thrive. When growing crops, we make sure that the soil has everything the plants need to thrive, because to limit the nutrients and care given to the plants, limits their growth, ultimately costing money. With people, however, we seem to forget that the lack of nutrients, and care can limit the growth of our fellow humans. This racks up staggering deficits, a recurring depth (debts) which has inescapable costs over a lifetime. Forbidden to thrive. Farmers know what our politicians can't seem to fathom, if you want healthy next generations, you need to give this generation all you've got, or at least what it needs. Anything less is abuse.

Instead of lush possibilities, the poor get spit roasted, so their juices can drip off slowly, into the gaping maw of the ultra wealthy. This electronic revolution that surrounds the planet, where everyone has access to vast troves of humanities' collected knowledge and writing, has changed forever and qualitatively, the way we deal with that knowledge. Still, even armed with the greatest ideas, work ethic or tenacity in the world, (which the poverty stricken often, have to have; simply to survive) the impoverished are not able to secure credit, except under extreme usury, they remain unable build equity in their neighborhood, or get treated fairly by cops or shop owners. If they do get someone to give them credit, that person wears a suit and lives in a better neighborhood. There are anti-community, forces at work, from the wealthy, elite, culture that owns all the debt in the "hoods". I think of the things that ultimately paid their freight in my life and they were few. I worked many long and undervalued hours for tiny baubles that wealthy friends could afford to  and would "lose" at a party or crash on purpose just to see what it would do. After all, it was given to them with no work required at all. I saved up for years to get a cassette tape player for instance, and worked a whole year delivering papers to get enough gear to go camping. My bikes were nearly always second-hand, my 8mm movie camera was a rummage sale find and when I bit the bullet and bought my Nikon FM, that too took over a year of saving from several jobs I worked even as a young teen. The long term expenditure of money adds to the costs of both film-making and photography and corporate executives who poisoned rivers at will made many hundreds more, perhaps thousands, on the film and processing. I calculated that my little movie camera pulled over a mile of film through her and nearly all of it was made into twenty minute filcks. I was not schooled in the concept of buying locally back then and even had I been, my desire to shoot both film and stills, required me to keep shifting money away from my local economic sphere. This economic handicap may actually be the best way to crack the nut of poverty, to show by example how money runs away from the very communities that produce wealth for the faraway "man". Had I become a major film producer in a town like Hollywood, millions of dollars would swirl around me, but only a precious few would grace my home community or be able to be spent "back home", wherever that had been.

My father, was able to join the jet set by consulting for an airline. He may have been one of the last people one would expect to break the law, but in many parts of his life, he bent and broke the rules, If not for that, he may have slipped back into poverty as well. Whether it was making gobs of money selling term papers, which netted him many-fold the cost of tuition and the way he saw it, as he studied for more classes, even subjects he was not taking officially, were like getting extra credits that he didn't have to pay for. He broke or bent so many rules over the course of his life that I'm sure even he lost count. However, many of the choices he made were out of desperately wanting to stay out of the poverty that spawned him. My grandfather told stories about how his family had spaghetti every night, with whatever vegetable was cheapest at the market. Spaghetti with peas on Monday, spaghetti with beets on Tuesday, all through the week, then, on Sunday, they would get spaghetti with meat. Luckily, my father was hard-working, bright and had squirreled away as much of the largess of his patrons as possible, to look flush while doing it. My father also had a lazy eye and wore superdark Wayfarers all of his life, turning his deficit into a superpower. The handsome mysterious, Italian thing was pretty big back then, so he was granted access to pretty lofty echelons of power. First as a Beatnik Theater Guy, later as a Management Consultant. For those who have not heard, a management consultant asks to borrow your watch, tells you what time it is and typically does not return the watch! He explained to me when I was in my Twenties that all those term papers he wrote paid enormous dividends, because he would use the same strategies to study the material as he used to study companies who hired him. He would seek to know more about their companies than they did, which made him very highly prized and worth far more than they paid him. He always got a thrill out of being the smartest guy in the room and many, to this day, believe that he was a spy as well, because he was exploiting the information he had, how shall I say it? Outside of work as well. He was lucky though because he was able to pass as a wealthy disaffected brat even from a young age, The privilege of being white helped him to attain wealth.

Few are granted passage to higher social classes, however, he was able to make the transition and spent several fortunes before his death. During the mid-Eighties, he was making a quarter million each year, spending wildly and investing in what turned out later to be frivolous investments.

My own experience was to go homeless twice, continue college while sleeping in a cardboard box. Interestingly, the day I got housing, I went back to the box, which had been in a cornfield behind the Lab Science building, just to get my dop kit and a pillow, I had left behind, too many belongings to get in one trip, but the whole she-bang had been combined off along with the corn, vanished without a trace! It snowed later that day, so I was glad to have a roof rather than cardboard, but I lost my favorite cake cutter which I still have not replaced. I never knew that my father had sold term papers, or my college days could have been very different!

After living hand to mouth for twenty years, I was far better at stretching a dollar than anyone else I knew. But for a few people I knew who had no problem stealing for their keep, I lived on far less than most of my friends. Not by choice, but out of necessity. Being the kind of conservative who would cut a piece of baloney in half to have some for tomorrow changes the way you see the world around you. It can be soul crushing to see the waste that has been codified in our subsidized, fossil energy culture. however, without that spirit crushing, there would be no wine of that vine, no insight into better ways of doing things, no inspired action. Now, we are experiencing a new age dawning. The general public is confronted with situations where doing the right things are actually cheaper and more effective than continuing to do the wrong things and many more of us are realizing every day how insidiously we have been lied to. Around the world, peasants are saying "Enough!"

We do not need cheap plastic crap from China, we don't need fossil energy at all, especially when we take into account the devastating ecological consequences of our fossil energy fueled legacy. not only our people have been impoverished, our cities and soils have been depleted, mined, carted away, or been turned to dust that blew away decades ago. Now, we know how to re-build soils and hold on to what we can scratch or glean from what giant corporations have left behind. We the people will not be denied our right to life, liberty or the pursuit of our collective happiness. The uberwealthy have consolidated their gains over the course of the last fifty years. as they realized how fast the ROI pays back when they buy politicians, and how easy it has become to shape the narrative and even define the terms of our debate, they have skillfully played us out of every hand we had, every foothold we could establish. The only thing we have left is a solid foundation of humanity, peace, love for one another and compassion. all else is just flack that the man inspires or throws up to divide us. flack, for those who may not know, was like an aluminum foil confetti cloud, used to obscure attacking planes from radar.

The most revolutionary thing we can do is teach and educate. Many have heard me rant on before that the second most expensive thing on the planet is education, the most expensive is ignorance. I'm not even sure where /I heard those words the first time, but I thank whoever uttered them, for it has allowed me to redouble my efforts to changing the world, one mind at a time. My father once commented to me that poverty looks the same everywhere on Earth. I took him at his word because he traveled the world and saw plenty of it. Now, in places like Detroit, Milwaukee and Cleveland, folks are left holding bags of debt after everyone fled the neighborhood. Some effort is being made to sustainably develop these decimated areas, but much of that soil will forever be contaminated with lead and other toxic metals, the opposite of what you want in your gardens. Often, because of structural abuse, we continue to make mistakes even when we try to do good. That is why I advocate for several things being taught at every grade level. first and foremost, the power and control wheel. also, like Italy has just done, require students at every grade level to have at least some content about global climate destabilization and how fossil energy use perturbs the atmosphere and our oceans. Every student, every year also should be learning age appropriate lessons on union history, some home economics skills and financial/baking skills as well. Handing young children over to a market at age eighteen with no financial skills of wherewithal is criminal. To operate under the new awareness, we need to have facility with our surroundings and culture, which have been left sorely lacking in recent years. getting every child up to the level of fully functional in all of these subjects may be too much to wish for, but we can try.

One of the greatest challenges we face is the deeply ingrained, but mistaken notion that Malthus was right. The reason that these lies are absorbed so readily is that it confirmed the older notions of Calvinism which had been resurrected from the Divine Right of Kings. The ultra-wealthy do love their long held beliefs and "reasons" for pissing on the rest of us! I can't imagine a single psychopath or sociopath would! Malthus was wrong, Calvin was wrong and the Divine Right of Kings was wrong. The hacking away at our nation that happened over the last fifty years may not be corrected at once, but without a drastic shift right now, the ship of state will continue to take on water in the form of corporate welfare and subsidization, debt for the many to enrich the few that will cripple, forever any chance of rebuilding. Not getting what an individual needs cripples the individual and their community, but crippling the community cripples everyone's chance of survival. Those who own our indebtedness need to give back and there are simple ways to do it.

Recent Work

This last few moons have been crazy busy. Not only did we withstand some local flooding, but we lived in a Habitrail-like environment for weeks after as we shuffled and condensed files and belongings before hauling things back to the basement.  This in addition to a busier than normal workload with stagecraft, and a brief trip to teach biochar making to folks near Austin,TX. ECO-Tours of Wisconsin, the not-for profit that my wife and I began over a decade ago continues to sponsor trips to teach this ancient and miraculous technology (technique). During the week of Earth Week, I got to attend the events associated with Helfenstein Soup Council, a local not-for-profit I helped start over twenty-five years ago. They named their Environmental Hero and had a teach in about some other ecologically oriented not-for-profits. It is refreshing, compelling and affirming to feel the spirit of the Earth rising through her people, our efforts, combines interests and to experience the near infinite blossoming of the younger generations to engage with and take to heart with renewed vigor, their own unique and well informed eco-ethics.  

Some of the groups who were represented were Mother Earth, Clean Water Action Council, Wisconsin Greens, Citizen's Climate Lobby, Mermaids Without Borders, a local clean water advocacy group and others. Over a hundred citizens came through the event even before I got there, but their numbers were a strong sixty or so people who stayed for the entire series of presentations including the Environmental Hero Award.

In my own way, I am putting finishing touches on my book about biochar and have put together a comprehensive Power Point Presentation that can teach anyone how to become an expert at the ancient process fo sequestering carbon in soil for geologic time. If this is your first time reading my blog, I will try to make as succinct a list of benefits of biochar as possible. It greatly expands the habitat for soil microbial life. Whereas sand has over an acre of surface area per Tablespoon and clay has about 1/3 more than that , biochar has nearly one and three quarters acres of surface area on an amount of char about 1/15th the size! Humus rich soils can absorb and slowly release about an inch of rainwater for every inch of their depth, but biochar can absorb six times its own weight in water outperforming the richest soils in this respect by a factor of three! Also, with regard to the soil microbiome,  Biochar enriched soils have 25% greater species diversity; which leads to stability for those of you that do not study biology regularly. It also has been scientifically proven that microbes that are part of this bacteriologic culture are greater than two orders of magnitude greater in soils that have been enriched with biochar when compared to non-anthropogenic soils nearby. Soils amended with biochar at just one percent of the total volume also have a greater Cation Exchange capacity (CEC) and nutrient retention over soil that does not contain this human-made black gold.

What does that mean for the average grower? Well, it means several things. First and most importantly for all of us is that this molecular sponge holds water and nutrients where plants need them, near the surface, thus protecting surface and groundwater quality. It reduces the need for irrigation by over 1/3 which means more water in the water table where most drinking water comes from. It means doubling of crop production and more greenhouse gasses being sequestered in soil fo rlong periods.  The list goes on and on.

I am available to teach virtually anywhere. I have been making and using biochar for over ten years and am willing to share my expertise with anyone who is interested in doing more with less. My e-mail is tnsaladino42@hotmail.com.

Austin Texas Trip

For me, the last week of October was spent in Austin, Texas area teaching and doing outreach for future biochar classes in the Colorado River Watershed. First off, let me say, Texas does not do anything small. The City of Austin, which used to have about as many folks as Green Bay, Wisconsin including all of its suburbs (250,000) has grown to a metro area of over two million souls. Nancy and I were able to tap in to more than half a dozen oases that retain a bit of the slow pace, of old, reaffirm our connection to nature and we were lucky to be able to establish ties to a network of people turning the corner on the rampant destruction of nature that exists nearly everywhere one looks. Austin has a historic connection to the environmental movement in that Lady Bird Johnson was from 'round there. I knew that she helped to midwife the birth of modern environmental ethics and popularize the notion that without available intact natural environs, human beings would die from the soul crushing aspects of concrete and steel. However, I did not know the extent of her involvement in networking, community building and her relentless work in bringing to fruition some of the most remarkable in-town natural areas I have ever seen.

They are pouring more concrete in Travis, Hays and Williamson Counties each year than most small counties in Wisconsin have in total, but there is a growing realization that this arc cannot be sustained. Most of the "Leftys", having seen their homespun and quirky city ransacked by corporate forces, are either digging in their heels for the long, good fight or running, arms and legs akimbo to the Hill Country or points beyond the reach of the superslabs. It is still possible, within the megalopolis, to carve out a lifestyle that keeps neighborhoods walkable and with the advent of electric people moving devices, those opportunities seem to be growing, but the congestion and the affection/affinity most people seem to have with the automobile, the attendant woes that come along with those rides continue to grow.

Congestion seems to creep in all directions and unless one is willing to take a circular orbit around the metropolis, traffic occasionally snarls for twenty miles whichever way you go. The few times we were on the limited access roadways, pop-up gridlock seemed to be everywhere, anxious to steal your time. I can't imagine that building more roads will alleviate the congestion. In my over half century of experience, paving just assures that more folks will drive there. We even saw events where people purposefully drove off the road, over curbs and gutters and on sidewalks to get through when there was not enough pavement.

At every big box "hardware" store, like Home Despot, lines of men expectantly wait, as they did during the Depression, for someone with money and materials to drive by so they can ask them if they are willing to exchange cash for labor. The underclass is not shy there, nor do they lack motivation. A few have tools or at least a tool belt, but many can not afford even that. Nancy asked, after a few days, if there was a union of beggars or perhaps a guy like Fagan from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist handing out the best begging spots for his cut at the end of each night. After a bit of research, I found that "rent" is charged for the best spots, where cars stop regularly for red lights and people beg for coins and green money. The impromptu tent cities that have appeared under the countless overpasses seem to be the very real cost of growth. Luckily, the better off are not shy either. In the airport I saw a postcard that was a picture of the population sign that read: Austin, Pop. FULL. This is not just the opinion of some, but it seems to be the mantra of the many. Each of the two million seem to be working an angle and the whole is a vibrant and frenetic mass of sprawl.

We checked the EWG (Environmental Working Group) searchable database that allows one to enter any zip code in the United States and get a detailed analysis of the local city water supply and decided not to drink local water while we were there. It seems that the burgeoning population has overtaxed the already tenuous water supply and several local residents told stories of the water providers for their towns, cities and villages that made the water providers sound like mobsters. The hair on our necks came to attention when chilling stories were told about what we hope would be public servants acting like extortionist poisoners. Heck, I didn't even want to shower once I read the facts about the water supply. How can such great people in such a lovely spot allow the life of their city to be ground out under the boot of the ultra-wealthy? The answers to that question might take a lifetime of research to tease out and unravel.

Did I mention, I had a birthday while there? We had some of the best locally grown pecans!

We also went out to Enchanted Rock State Natural Area. Definitely worth the trip!

We saw thirty acre parking lots, covered with steel frames on rubber tires that had giant signs reading "TINY HOUSE TRAILERS" with a phone number. We saw countless dwellings that could not pass even a casual inspection and we saw "homes" that should have been torn down generations ago. We saw countless shacks with Audis, BMWs, and high end trucks and SUVS that were worth more than the domicile itself parked outside. If not for these swayback, dilapidated homes though, more people would be sleeping in tents, under those same overpasses. The flip side of all of this poverty and growing public health crisis is a frenetic affirmation of life. The music scene is off the hook. Any night of the week there might be thirty or more live bands you could go out and see. Top quality restaurants are tucked in to places that look like utter dives and brightly colored murals and public art is nearly everywhere. Jung theorized that every bit as strong as the drive toward life, in humans there is a death drive and in the air, you can feel the electricity that is created by the two of them there. When thousands of humans line the bridge under which a colony of bats has made their home every day just before sunrise and again, just before sunset, you know that the amazement people feel when they experience the feeling of being part of nature is at least as alluring as the feeling they get when they are kept apart from it.

We were also urged to go to Barton Springs for a swim and to explore the many nature trails that bisect the city. Fast friends we met told us of the wildflower gardens and wild and scenic opportunities to explore nature while we were visiting, so it was plain to us that these things are considered valuable by the people of Austin. We were directed to the regional hot-spots for nature lovers and took most of them in as well. Perhaps these places have become even more appreciated as the population stacks up and overflows into the countryside. When we did get off the beaten path, it was like a kayaker in a big eddy pool. It felt restful, serene and we gained the insight of human-scale interaction. We appreciated the kindness and insight that came from individuals who carve out a living among the hasty opportunists. There seemed to be no shortage of gracious hosts and helpful locals, perhaps that is part of the reason they have gotten the business (as my grandfather called it) from well-heeled thugs. Nature seems to be alive and well wherever they have not poured concrete. I have heard that Austin is to Texas what Madison is to the rest of Wisconsin; an island of liberalism in a conservative state. I'm not sure that either analysis is true. The tendrils and tentacles of the super rich have invaded everywhere and it does not matter if your state used to have a Socialist Governor, the cleanest and most abundant water or had the most co-ops per capita as Wisconsin did or if you live in a place where oil was considered black gold, the right to use up what the land has to offer is considered sacrosanct and there is still an active push to change the Constitution to prevent property and income tax from ever being collected, the fight to retain some semblance of dignity and progress exists right alongside the crushing poverty that comes from extraction and regressive beliefs that might, wealth and privilege make right and that all others can suck it.

I am planning a return to the area because so many people were so excited about what biochar can do for the region. In the very same area that is being exploited by the opportunists there are people who have taken a long view that holds as sacred our rights to be affirmed and loved, well fed and supported by the natural world. I am in league with these folks and cannot wait to help them spread the word about beneficial changes we can make with just a bit of forethought and commitment to the natural world. If we do not defend and enhance Mother Nature, who will? If we don't do it now, with the attendant courage and commitment, the tenacity of the rest of nature, when will it be done?

Progress and Poverty by Henry George

Perhaps one of the most influential books of all time, it is written in a style that can be difficult to read, because it is dense. The information it contains is difficult to accept yet the research that went into uncovering the facts upon which it is based is impeccable. During my coming of age, the subject of Economics was considered dry and boring, but when we realize that there is nothing that affects people more than the economy they live within, the nature of the discipline changes. Mr. George makes the cold, often clinical approach come alive with real world examples of the uninterrupted fallacies that guide and govern the way we think about the world around us. Millions of copies were sold and the book was translated into many languages over a century ago, but the material it covers is essential knowledge and is especially important in our day and age.

I fully admit to being a bit of a nerd. Of all my peers, I was probably the most interested in economics and how our policies and prejudices guide the invisible hand of the markets. I have always said that we have not had free markets, at least as far back as the establishment of what later became the FDA. In a free market, all drugs both poisons and remedies would be freely available. Tainted food would also be freely available and non-food items could be used as adulterants at will by anyone with the wherewithal to create, package and sell them. Some might say that these conditions do exist and that means that the markets are free, however, the rules morph depending on where you are and often who you are in the economic system. If your companies are part of the large donor class in Washington D.C. or you have cozy affiliations with the seat of power within your county or state, different rules apply. That means the market is only as free as your contact list, or who owes you favors.

Back in the day, during the early Reagan years, there was an all out attack on the Economics Departments of major universities. economists knew that Reaganomics were fiction. The wealthy have never parted with a single dollar that they did not think would redouble their income, power and influence. That is the crux of the tome written by Henry George. Anyone who tried to speak truth to power within the established world of Economics was ruthlessly undermined, threatened and deemed a trouble-maker by the Administration, thugs in Congress and the major media went right along with the deception because the majority of media moguls knew that their fortunes would improve if they got on board with Reagan's ignorant rantings about tax cuts and his justification of inhumanity of wealth perpetrating crimes against humanity through the elimination of the middle class and revocation of the social safety nets that our government had established as far back as the Administration of FDR. The perverse logic was that by demonizing the poor, we could allow the wealthy to keep more of their "hard-earned" cash, that confiscatory tax policy had led to a breakdown of our collective "morality" and that  those who worked the hardest at the lowest paying jobs were somehow responsible for our unwed mothers, the growing ranks of those who openly admitted that they were gay and the rise in crime that many cities were experiencing. Not one of these beliefs or accusations was ever proven to be true but our nation seemed to want a father figure and who didn't have a judgemental self-righteous and authoritarian father, right?

This book, Progress and Poverty details dozens of factual historic events that cut the legs out of the arguments put forth by Malthus, who has perhaps single-handedly created more obfuscation and ongoing strife than any other "scientist" of the nineteenth century.  
His theories have justified the entrenched beliefs that population will always outpace availability of resources and that any technological advance will be unable to provide increased quality of life because our numbers will increase exponentially, outpacing the ability of the environment to support us. Now you might say, "It is true! I have seen this effect with my own eyes." however what we are all seeing is the diametric opposite. Population frequently follows a different curve. Many young people from around the planet are not choosing to have children. Even though technologies are being developed that greatly increase both the ability of our species to do more with less and the quality of life we can experience with less cost to the environment.

Just as Darwin, who read Malthus in 1838, did not understand that he was lucky, not "fit", Malthus did not understand the root causes of his privilege either. Wealth cannot fathom itself. Those on top of the pile can never experience or have empathy for the individuals upon whose suffering their exulted view is made possible. This book, by George, refutes this pedantic theory at its core. We have living proof of the opposite, yet if we talk to our friends and neighbors, how many of them will say such ridiculous things as, "The poor have brought on their own plight by making immoral choices." or that "Welfare whores steal from others by making us pay higher taxes." or "Single mothers should have kept their legs together and I should not be made to pay fort hem to raise children that are a result of their own depravity and lust." I only know that people say these things, feeling justified in doing so because I have heard self righteous, often religiously motivated people say them. Often, these lies are allowed to pass, unquestioned even though many of the most moral people i have ever met were on the poor end of the socio-economic scale. Poverty is no more brought about by poor choices than wealth accrues to those who work hard.

The Malthusian theory was just another way of trying to prop up the Divine Right of Kings, so too Darwin tried to link evolutionary survival with fitness. The wealthy never were part of the same game that the rest of us were, but they set the rules of the game, the definitions of the terms that are "agreed to" in public discussions and proffered unsupported ideas that would contaminate our minds for centuries. When the book, Progress and Poverty was read by millions, it changed the course of economics and politics. We need the information contained in it more now than ever and if you have not gotten a chance to be exposed to this well-researched and timely material, get it, read it and understand that someone over a century ago took many years to research and put it together for others, not for the enrichment of himself. It was not written to start a political dynasty, or to placate a wicked man's conscience, as so many books find their way to market today but to enlighten others about the way the world has worked for millennea.

true? necessary? kind?

i speak with hundreds of people every month and the vast majority are struggling. beyond trying to make ends meet with rising costs and stagnant wages, they are looking to the social fabric of our nation with disquieting results. we have a racist in the white house, police continue to practice genocide on mostly young, mostly black, men. quasi-police forces are putting children in overcrowded cages and families are being torn asunder to appease racist tendencies enmeshed with isolationism. we are actively supporting both the state of israel and saudi arabia and their ongoing genocide against their perceived foes, mostly young, mostly oppressed, and wholly innocent neighbors. not only our own government, but the proxies of our most elite class are creating mayhem around the globe, seemingly praying for and perpetrating policies designed to hasten armageddon, yet we know not how to combat this influx of hate and deceit.

many are trying to understand how the other side an be so completely oblivious to the fatal fallacies in their arguments. i can not speak for them. we do, however need to hold one another to some standards. a dear friend taught me something she read about recently. we need to ask ourselves before each statement, is this true? is this necessary? is this kind? those who can answer yes to at least two of the three need to be heard. we are all smart enough to weed out the small number of statements that can only fulfill one or two of these requirements. in time we will just ignore those who do not abide be these parameters out of the public sphere. in my run for congress (to represent the people of northeast wisconsin in the u.s.house of representatives) i pledge to do everything in my power to pass comprehensive changes in the fcc regulatory scheme. the airwaves and digital communications must be made to adhere to these parameters. this is reflected in my admonition to stop making stupid people famous. those who have nothing but spite and hate, deceitful lies and unsupported innuendo in their quiver need to be shut out of public discourse.

the shift that takes place when we hold ourselves to this important standard only becomes clear when we internalize the messages behind this sort of gate-keeping. when we imagine a flow chart, there can be horrible, often veiled threats to our own humanity in the endless babble that currently takes place. asking ourselves, "is it true" sifts and winnows the lies. imagine a "news" and entertainment source such as fox "news" would cutting their programming by over half to eliminate their lies. both sides cannot be used as a ruse to allow lies to be given the weight of truth, no matter how entertaining it can be to watch ignorant people try to prop up their fictions. removing the lies from our president's speeches and tweets would eliminate over 80% of his "ideas". at that point, we could probably debate the merits of his fuzzy, convoluted logic and his exploitation of fear and hate embeded in the other 20%. lies often distract us from important truths. in our own lives, not giving voice to lies might change not only what we say, but how we think. to truly respect and sanctify one another, we need to first honor ourselves by adhering to a strict standard of being truthful. those we try to communicate with will understand that we value them as well, that is why we are putting in the effort to research and learn, making sure to speak truth.

the question "is it necessary?" has even more sweeping effects. think of all the utterly useless information the average person needs to wade through to arrive at a single shred of useful information. by paring away at unnecessary information, extraneous data, stories that are of no use and epic dramas having no bearing on our lives, how we can be more effective. our stature amongst others will be catapulted to a different realm. others, seeing the importance of what we say, will be more inclined to listen, take us more seriously and internalize the fact that we indeed care for them enough to filter out unnecessary statements.

finally, asking "is it kind?" works to prevent us from debasing others, dehumanizing them, desecrating their spirit, humiliating or shaming them. again this has massive ramifications in how we are perceived and whether or not and how well and completely people will take in ideas we have to offer. in these troubled times, it can only help to be more authentically compassionate with one another. following these simple guidelines, we will all have better communication, more meaningful interactions and much deeper experiences with one another. please join with my friend and i, our friends and family and millions of others, perhaps all six plus billion of us, to express necessary truth kindly.

ubuntu.

When your time is up...

I try not to harp on white people problems, but I have to confess, I have felt terror and lived to tell the tale.
For years, I have driven on one of the most deadly stretches of road in the state. Yesterday I counted five times that idiots tried to wreck me and none of those drivers gave throwing the dice a second thought. Complete ineptitude and offensive driving were on full display. The culprit, perhaps was not the brainless ones piloting their cars, but whatever they were spacing out about. The time to attend to your surroundings is when you are driving! Pesky Blighters! On the way home four more stepped up to keep the threat of death alive and I thought for sure, there is some sort of idiot maximum, which I had sustained.

Untrue; today, just seven miles from my city, a lady came down the Freedom on ramp at breakneck speed, only to encounter me going perhaps five miles per hour slower than the limit, never looking, never turning her head and the passing lane was full, so I had no escape. She slammed on her brakes and was right up on my ass, before the merge lane even started to go away. If she had paid any attention, perhaps she would have noticed a car's ass end rapidly approaching, but no, probably ended up being the closest call of all ten of these events, but if you are coming into traffic, you are supposed to match their speed, that's why I go a little slower than the limit, so folks who are merging have more time to blend into traffic.
Jumping into my following distance robs everyone behind us. Please don't do it. forcing me to slow to let you jump the line is just rude! To those who jump lane to lane, to try to get ahead, we all see your ass end at the next stop light, or exit, so let's act like we are all on one team, remembering that if we all arrive alive, we can all win!

It is Only Everything We Love That is Threatened

I heard an eloquent womyn say this recently. Truly, what will it take to get us collectively up off our asses and get us to stop letting the pressure of the electrons emitted by the teevee on our retina push us back down, onto the couch? How about a couple poorly timed, fake attacks on tankers bound for Japan? While the Japanese Prime minister is visiting Iran, securing the release of a U.S
 citizen held on spy charges? When the nation is doing it's level best to be on good behavior amongst the other nations of the Earth. This is a false flag attack at the very least. Nothing to see here, except deception. When endless sabre rattling does not suffice, the war machine slowly ratchets up the pressure until something goads the public into another bloodthirsty human rights violation. We have seen these things play out far too many times.
I am running for congress, others may write letter sot the editor, or tell their friends about their favorite candidates. Still others will speak for us at public hearings and in various fora. It has been generations since we had a real organized political citizenry, perhaps it will come again. surely enough of us have had our oxen gored to enrich the oligarchs.

The beaver is one of my spirit guides. They are industrious and their work leads to a cascade of ecological benefits. Learn some of the ways to do that here. Please, drop a line or comment if you have insights that you would like to share.

Post Sabbatical

I have returned, renewed, refreshed and with clarity, but that has been more than offset by the moral injury I sustain daily watching a traitor disassemble our nation before my very eyes. The times require a complete and utter upturning and upheaval. Everywhere the fascist state intrudes into our lives, it needs to be pruned back. Everywhere racism rears its head, cut it off. I don't care if we are up against Medusa herself, get in there and start slashing. At this point, I'm not even going to care what realm you operate in. stand up, say "Hells no!" when given demeaning, life sucking, B.S. jobs, things managers would never dream of doing themselves, or that outright hurt others. Just say no takes on deeper meaning when wielded against oligarchs.

The eternal spiral unfolding as our Earth, passes through space is roughly shaped like a corkscrew. The living cycle of the last year, independent from blogging gave me a deeper understanding of being clear, no matter what your perspective. Realizing that we will never again have the same perspective is both liberating and bittersweet. Instead of being immersed in writing in a certain style, during my sabbatical, I wrote both on my book about my bicycle ride around the Great Lakes and two smaller books, about things my mother has done and my reminiscences about NYC during the years I was a frequent guest and sometime resident on island. In our minds eye, time is virtually irrelevant. Writers are often as comfortable in the moments preserved by writers of a thousand years ago as they are in this moment. Piecing together salient ideas from across the many centuries is the task of those who want to teach and enlighten. My logo can be described far easier than it is to make it so.

If you have ever heard of the merkaba, it is like a spinning three (or multi-) dimensional vortex. a sphere of energetic resonance with the all. Sublime as it may seem, I want my logo to vibrate with that energy, perhaps flashing in reversing colors, or jiggling about slightly, so they have the energy of life. The logo, corporate image is the analemma, complete with moonthly increments and a zodiacal index along the design.

Hovering over the relative "dates" (parts of the year, represented along the line of the design) would bring up other pages where one could see what type of ECO-Tours are offered, specific to that time of year, registration information and helpful information about pagan events going on at that time as well. Please, if you know of anyone who is a crack programmer, set them this challenge. If someone can make what I just described happen, I'd cut them in for a lifetime supply of biochar.

This revolt needs to focus on getting the oligarchs and their money out of politics. Our founers, above all were honorable, they based their candidacy for their position on intellect, belief that a better future could be forged, but now our tastes are told to us by the ultra wealthy. their interests are served, not ours. If minimum wage had increased like CEO salaries, it would be thirty three dollars per hour. Ideas matter. If we are to have our democracy, we have to let all ideas be heard. Cable news stations have spent more time on Biden than all the other candidates combined. How are we to hear through the noise? Biden wrote the Crime Bill, which those of us who knew about the criminal justice system said would perpetrate genocide against the black community, which it has. All the way back then, progressive voices called for police pension funds to take the hit for extra-judicial killings of innocent people, but did the powers that be ever say that out loud? Hells No!

Again, I write to tell the story about what to do, do not give up the ship. Do know that you are valid.

Strong

Rock bottom in the age of extreme resource extraction.
500 years of colonization have left us addicted to fossil fuels,
short-sighted "development" and resource wars.
where has our pursuit of the American Dream led us?
How can we begin the road to recovery?

Our water, source of all life is being threatened by a trio of new, extreme extraction processes:
Fracking, tar sands and sulfide mining.

This blog attempots to share hard-hitting, honest analysis,
entertaining and compassionate story-telling,
with graphics from Beehive Collective
and stories from around the Great Lakes.

The beaver is just doing what beavers do, however, whole ecosystems develop and thrive upon their decisions and actions. Last Summer, I walked on a ten foot tall beaver dam and saw more than a dozen species all helped by a single beaver family.

The information preceding the photo was taken pretty much wholesale from the Beehive Collective. Their works are in the public domain as part of the Creative Commons. I urge all of my readers to donate to their cause, as well as support my work at paypal. My account there is my e-mail, tnsaladino42@hotmail.com

Weak

I have been AWK Away From Keyboard for a long while. Sadly, the last stupid thing the Deceitful traitor said was something incoherent about bird memorials below wind turbines. Over one billion birds fly headlong into buildings every year, most commonly into lit buildings at night, which leads to their death. One billion, compared to between 20,000 and 500,000 Even at that high end, a half million, two thousand times as many birds die from building collisions as get killed by turbine blades. Perhaps it is time to scientifically make decisions based on facts, not whim.

Each day, I continue to share truth as it comes to me. I still cannot fathom why we don't have the ability to just vote no-confidence and get on with inviting a whole new batch of leaders to the table. These old farts who are stuck on last generation thinking need to shove off! Get organizing, challenge all seats! Make sure that the voice of the people rises to such a din as to drown out the oligarch-owned media! Remember, when planning your actions we have no need to get defensive, our position is truth. You cannot simultaneously negotiate peace, while preparing for war. Laws have been created to protect us from kings and tyrants. Money was never intended to be "speech". Corporate welfare is class warfare end of story.

I was attempting to build a sunshade for the upstairs porch, but we found a much more elegant solution. This solar panel, built in 1974 continues to produce 1/3 the annual heating budget for this two-family home. It was the first of this now-defunct brand to be fabricated from aluminum, after nearly forty years, the panels have clouded some, but this Summer, it will get new, higher tech polymer glazong that will last even longer than the fiberglass they had available in 1974. Whenever it is eighty or hotter in the panel, a fan circulates the air into the house. Literally, four moving parts. Efficiency.

Every dollar we spend, every hour we spend is in service to something. When we enrich the faraway billionaires, that value never comes back. When we spend within our local community, the money reverberates around enriching many layers of the same local economy. The argument that oligarchs use, that they are divinely entitled to rule, dates back to Calvinism. I think we can give up on it after 500 years of evolution. The poor are not the problem, it is the tiny scintilla of a fraction who rule with their dollars. Buying local and producing everything here shuts off the spigot of our dollars, making them and their arguments weak.

You know the drill, buy local and enrich the people you care most about, those around you. If you want tips on energy efficiency, so you can spend less on energy, retaining more of your wealth for local investment, I'll be happy to share some things I have learned. I have owned five houses, each one uses half the energy and water it did when I bought it. These benefits will last, being multiplied throughout the lifespan of each of those homes. My brother-in law is a salesman at heart and posts inspirational sayings where he can see them each day, changing them by the week so he does not treat them like wallpaper. The last time I was at his place, one of his sayings really got to me. It said that the value of our lives is not just in what we could do or amass for ourselves, but all the benefits to all the people we have helped as well. Powerful words to live by.

My Commitment To You

When I began posting to this site, I was relatively ignorant of how and why social change agents were using the blogosphere. I thought of the digital realm as a way to get information out in the post paper world, like putting newspaper articles out without having to utilize hard copy. I quit blogging at other sites that began injecting advertising into my posts without my authority. The very first time that it happened, I saw several hypertext links within my copy. When I took my mouse to the link, it took me to a corporate welfare recipient's page and the article, (or post) I was writing was speaking to the issue that these corporate entities have stacked our system against us.

You know the score. Corporados infinite power and control over our lives, we the people are left fighting over scraps. Because I am dedicated to and trying to express my deep love for human beings, not corporations, this was the most heinous slap in the face a writer could experience. When I wrote to the people who were making decisions about the hosting platform, they told me that they were only trying to monetize their site and that if users did not want to pay for their access, that they had to reach out to corporations to add their ads to content to raise money.

This might be fine for some people, but the fact that I was writing content that was clearly encouraging people to vote against with every dollar they spend in the marketplace, these same corporate giants; yet embedded in my posts were actual ads for those same non-change agents, the very people who are cleaning up on our pain, made me sick. I parted ways with that platform immediately. They might be great folks, but they certainly did not understand their part in what some refer to as "just business". I have even posted my ideas regarding those two words being used in proximity to one another. There is nothing just about business the way it is most often perpetrated against us.

Take for example the news today. We were finally told, explicitly, that the 800,000 Federal workers who went without pay for a month are just the tip of the iceberg. In addition, there are over a million more federal contract employees who will not be eligible for back pay. Their numbers are hidden. If it were blood in urine, we would call it occult blood. Just because you can't see it, does not mean it is not there. Including their losses over the more than month-long government shutdown changes the nature of and long-term pain involved in this recent treason the President has perpetrated against our nation. For decades now, contract employees have increased as a percentage of our Federal and State workforce. This has been a huge part of the right-wing takeover that dates back to Ronald Reagan. Getting these people off the government payroll precludes pension requirements, allows government to do more for less money and it also allows the spin off of managerial and executive positions within these contracted businesses, but at what cost?

Put simply, the cost is human suffering. This was brought into sharp focus during the recent shut-down. One of the many costs of putting a petulant child-mind in the Oval Office. I hesitate to use the term child-mind because it makes children sound stupid, they are not. In fact, a friend loves to tell the story of her fourth grade daughter who was involved with a mock election for President a couple years ago. Prior to the Presidential election, they had their own vote and lengthy discussions about the candidates followed their vote. Over 80% of the children voted for Hillary Clinton and when asked why, their reasons were nearly unanimous. Trump is a bully they said. He is mean and hates womyn, the elderly, handicapped and people of color they said. So, in fact the term child mind only undermines the deeply aware and staunchly compassionate sid eof children that don't exist in the man we named "President".

What does this have to do with online advertising and the beginning of this post you may ask?  Well, I continue to research and study, not just ecological facts, sustainability, politics, social norms and the effects of oligarchy on what we see and read, I even why and how other people blog. Oddly enough, many people do it to make money, selling their content to the advertiser's dream audience. The nature of advertising in the blogosphere is unique, because these mere words and ideas are able to create deep connections. Trading on the trust and familiarity readers have for their favorite bloggers, corporate America has the ability to latch on to deep feelings in the readers, selling to them on a nearly sub-conscious level. The very real possibility exists that people will think, "If my favorite blogger likes this company or that product, perhaps I will too."

This dangerous association can sell things that would never be accepted in the marketplace if not for the familiarity we have with our sources of information.

This blog remains ad-free because I find most solutions to be beyond marketability. I don't want to get rich selling things. We all typically have more than we need already. The vast majority of my readers have food, shelter and enough to live. My goal is to help them do it more gracefully, to share information that helps lead to grace under pressure as it ratchets up in our current system. We need more truth tellers and more problem solvers, not more products. Especially now that we are seeing massive growth in the sharing economy, we also need more services and ways to help our community.

There was no attribution for this photo, so I'm not even sure who to credit for the work. Rest assured, it is here for educational purposes only. Next time you hear of a cop putting an innocent person to death, remember this image.

According to many experts who advise and teach bloggers to monetize their work, I have been doing things all wrong. My posts are too long, I don't include three three-word action points at the end and I refuse to court advertisers in an attempt to monetize this work. I may try to change, if just to look a little more like other blogs, but you can rest assured that I will never sell out my readers for a corporation that exhibits misogynistic, Calvinistic, or exploitative practices. That rules out most commercial entities. Instead, I will occasionally include my Paypal account number, asking you to send some money if and when you can. The sustainable ideas and actions that I share save me thousands of dollars a year and I encourage everyone to utilize than to increase their quality of life at lower cost. I don't expect anyone to send their entire savings to me for continuing to speak truth to power, but even ten percent of the money you save would help me to get a bit of reimbursement for  the many hours spent researching to be able to put together cogent posts.

Action plan: First, NEVER GIVE UP! We are winning many victories around the globe.
Second, BE THE CHANGE you wish to see in the world. Compassion starts with you.
Finally, APPRECIATE OTHERS. Sometimes that means giving cash or needed services to others.

If any of my posts seem valuable to you, my Paypal account is tnsaladino42@hotmail.com which is also my e-mail. If you would like to ask me a question, request a topic for my blog, or just send a note to tell me what you think or feel about any of my writing, you can help me by sharing money, thoughts or ideas, I would appreciate any or all of those things. Also, remember that if you have any questions about making the highest quality biochar possible, I charge $100 per hour for consultation services. when you understand that biochar lasts forever in soil, the value begins to become apparent.

I continue to work to keep this site ad-free and appreciate your interest/commitment to making the world a better place.

Green New Deal

Our human culture, as many have characterized it, is like a cancer growing across the planet. More than one person has claimed that the only viable solution to the human condition might be a giant meteor or other calamity. I have heard from many that they no longer like people, or that humanity is, pardon their language, fucked. I don't believe any of these positions, but do recognize the reasons some would be led to them. Some people call our current time period post-capitalist society, some prefer the term Anthropocene, the geologically significant period in which human desecration of the geophysical world will remain evident to whatever species comes next It is true that our human-made footprint will remain for many millions of years hence. however, there are even more people calling for a Green New Deal.

Implementing such a plan may require more human cooperation and more humanitarian effort than has ever been amassed or wielded during any prior period of human history. This may not even seem possible to a population privileged enough that they have never had to accept responsibility for anything. Especially for the ruling class, the oligarchs who currently run our governments, every element of the Green New Deal sounds like naive pipe dreams or utter lunacy. Interestingly enough, it is perhaps the most pragmatic policy to come down the pike since the last New Deal, FDR's (Franklin Delano Roosevelt's) groundbreaking suite of legislation that codified such systems as Unemployment Compensation, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. There was a veritable alphabet soup of new agencies and departments under this legislation that not only employed those deemed unemployable by the richest men among us, but that led to transformative changes the likes of which our nation had never seen before and sadly, have never seen since. However, both logic and a broad perspective informed the New Deal and the same is true for the Green New Deal.

Spending an afternoon planting trees, our hands helped to transform this plot from a wind swept, inhospitable hilltop to a rich bio-diverse haven for people and wildlife. In the Green New Deal, a little goes a long way. Love always wins over fear.

Another great document that helps set ground rules for exactly what is needed at this time is the Earth Charter. (earthcharter.org) The real insane, naive pipe dream is the one harbored by the wealthiest men on the planet. The one that leads them to believe that they are better suited to run things than the rest of us. Right now, in early 2019, there are twenty-six men who own as much wealth as half the population. Income and wealth disparity is exponentially greater now than at any prior time in human history. Ironically, the impoverished are often more hospitable to strangers than those who can afford to feed everyone, but decide not to. In her groundbreaking and terrifying work, Diet for a Small Planet, Francis Moore Lappe' dug deep, long before the age of computers to find in 1970 that 1/7 of the entire human population was at risk for starvation. That number has stayed the same to the present day. In spite of the massive wealth poured into technology, food science, refrigeration, and transportation systems, heck the entire Green Revolution that brought western food production techniques to the impoverished around the globe, we still have about 1/7 of the world at risk of starvation. as we have all come to understand, insanity is trying the same thing over and over but expecting a different outcome. what we need are qualitative changes that have not been tried yet.

Those who have read my blog closely understand that in my opinion, each and every problem can be distilled down to the essential question, will we love? or will we fear? We have only ever been able to choose one. Albert Einstein wrote, "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." 
 The two are mutually exclusive. The same is true of love and fear. At this juncture, we are faced with the chance, as every preceding generation has been, to let go of our fear. Hoping for a meteor or praying for Armageddon are definitely on the fear side of the decision-making chart. When we list the good things and bad things that might come about because of any decision, we typically choose the side of that chart, or decision tree where the good outcomes outweigh the bad ones. However, "just business" and business as usual both present our human population with more bad outcomes than good results, so why do we continue to tell people who are hurting that they need to suck it up and stop complaining? In a word, Calvinism, the idea that mostly brown people, but also poor people from around the world make bad decisions and that their poverty is their own fault; punishment for being immoral. We may know that this is a lie, but the wealthy, who own our media continue to tell us the same lie and it is hard to find someone who is not contaminated with the idea.

We need to accept the fact that basic human rights include debt-free healthcare and education access to healthy air and water, as well as healthy soil upon which to grow our food. Until we get those things straight, we will continue to subsidize the richest men on the planet. Until we admit that each and every human being deserves food, shelter, community and love, we will continue to inappropriately value those with more cash at their disposal. Until we stop the commodification of people through "human resource" departments and meaningless "service" jobs that only serve the ultra-wealthy, we are doomed to keep making the same mistakes. One tragic symptom of our failure is that the average student debt in the U.S. of A. is $37,172.00 that represents a twenty thousand dollar increase in just the last thirteen years. My first home cost less than that. Thirty-five years ago, my total student debt was $1,050. Even so, the money grubbing loan sharks who were flocking around education at the time were quick to add their interest and penalties for late payments, thinking not of how the educated make better decisions or the good to our society that could come from the education, just what it would be able to purchase once they got their hands on my money. The story has been the same for generations, but we can tell a different story is we choose to.

I Hate Wasting Time

When I have my time wasted, am responsible for wasting time, or the time of others, it really chaps my ass. I wish that our leaders felt the same about us. For many, that seems their sole purpose. I know some will say that even paying attention to politics is a waste of time and for them, I have got to respectfully disagree, although that in itself may be wasting my time. I will try to keep this brief.

Last week I saw a photo of a Mexican politician who had climbed to the top of the new border fence between our nation and his. From the photo I was able to see that the vertical members of the fence are railroad rail on approximately one foot centers. It confused me when I began to think of how many of those giant steel rails would be needed for the nearly two thousand mile border. 5,280 pieces per mile times 2K equals 10,560K pieces thirty six feet long. The finished fence is to be thirty feet tall and extend six feet under ground to discourage shallow tunnels. So, we multiply again, the number of rails times the length and get 38,160K feet. Finally, we get to divide this immense number to get miles from feet, we divide by 5,280 and the result, for the number of miles of rail we would need to cut down to make this fence would be 7, 227 miles. More than enough to run an entirely new set of rails completely across our nation.

Wasting any more time on this disgrace, or a single dollar on this boondoggle is crippling our ability to do things that need to be doing. This post itself has wasted twenty minutes of my life, perhaps less of yours, but only if we continue to do nothing but talk about the traitor in the White House. I have finally settled on a name for the Terrorist-in-charge, it is Deceitful Traitor. My neighbor, who is far more conservative than I, calls him Phake Phony Phraud! whenever he hears the guy's name, he jumps up and down chanting "Phake Phony Phraud! Phake Phony Phraud!" At least he gets his lymph pumping, that is always a good thing.

I wrote a whole post on it years ago about how I used to sell pins, to turn any garment into a political statement and for years while I sold them, the best selling one was always the "Kill Your TV" Perhaps now we not only need to kill the piece of furniture that pumped us full of lies and hate, but our devices too. We all know the folks who wear Alexa or Siri on their wrists, research shows that people, on average check their "smartphones" multiple times per hour. Isn't that a waste of time?

 

Welcome Back!

I needed that! The last year, I had a self-imposed restriction on myself. I did no writing on my blogs. In the past, I had heard that attaining readership was based on regularity of posts. However, when I began I also had no idea how long writing my posts would take. In a completely arbitrary way, my mind seized on the idea of seven posts per month. In September of 2009, there was no way that I could have imagined writing 666 posts in nine years. In hindsight, it was hugely taxing. Some of the posts took weeks to put together and even the shorter ones may have taken several hours to write also taking many more hours, sometimes weeks of introspection and study to be able to write. In short, I may only do a post a week, now that I am back from a full year off. Perhaps I will ave better stories, more interesting insights and more relevant topics to muse over. Sadly, some of what had to be said before has still not been listened to, but I will refrain, as much as practicable from preaching to the choir.

This is a graph I made recently to understand the relative threat of different things that do happen. As you can see, the single pink line is deaths by terrorist, which include mass shootings. The Pink White and Blue line is gandgun deaths and the Yellow line is automobile deaths. Please note, the 55MPH national speed limit was in effect until just before the graph starts, November 1995. Sad day. At speeds over 55MPH, more fuel is required to break through the air and fuel mileage drops, about ten percent for every ten miles per hour. At 70 MPH, fuel efficiency suffers by fifteen percent. A 35MPG car at 55MPH for example, would only get 29.75MPG at the higher speed. That's fifteen percent more dollars being spent on fuel to go the same distance as well.
Additionally, and this is the thing I want every one of my readers to understand, the quality of your life, having taken the extra few minutes along your commute, will arrive calm and rested, not hyper and stressed. When experienced, those extra moments will be appreciated more and more. It also allows you to never feel that rush of adrenaline when you see a cop. I care about you. Every ten miles per hour slower you go, you reduce the chances of death in a crash by half. So, for slowing down fifteen miles per hour, you are 150% more likely to live if there is a crash. Or, you could say it backward, you are one and a half times more likely to die if you are involved in a crash at seventy MPH than if you had been going 55MPH. Scary numbers when you begin to understand them. Sharing this is part of my undying compassion for all people. If not one more person passed away in a crash, humanity could feel more noble.
When I was young, my mother took up with an auto mechanic who loved to race foreign cars. He drove like a crazed maniac on the track, but always drove courteously and according to the laws when on public thoroughfares. When driving, he said, it is like a game and when everyone comes home alive, we all win!

I could belabor this post with tons of things I have had a chance to think and feel during my year without words, but they exceed the ability of words to grapple with. As is said in the movie True Grit, I would need to spill the banks of English.