http://www.sprword.com/videos/earthlings/

I too await your blog on land reform, a complex and vital subject. I spent 7 years in Zimbabwe, and am at a loss to understand how taking productive farms away from white farmers, and giving them to peasant farmers is ‘redressing a social wrong’.

Just as you quick correctly say about ‘rural development’ and most people speaking only about agriculture, so too the idea of social redress cannot be linked to carving up and re-distributing the land. As you wrote in parts 1,2,3, land has different uses…and those in the southern part of Zimbabwe who are, in vain, trying to grow maize on land suited for raising cattle. and so forth.

Anyway, awaiting the blog on Land Reform. loads of interesting books on the subject, some of which written in SA.
cheers

No problem. I will inform Science magazine on your behalf that they are wrong. If they need someone to consult with when editing their articles maybe you can assist.

Incidentally nitrous oxides are very highly reactive ( which is why they are applied in extreme drag racing )

Those which are released by human agriculture, not only ‘artificial’ agriculture, as if humans are not animals and are alien to ‘the environment’! , are released near the ground, and have zip chance of rising into the upper atmosphere where the ozone layer is found, they will react with something pretty fast first.

Most of the upper atmosphere nitrogen oxides are produced by lightning, which also produces copious quantities of ozone!

This accounts for the ultra clean bleach like smell after a thunderstorm.

Link to a report on this phenomenon can be found here:

http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/earth_sciences/report-17245.html

Most know (me included that our industrial civilization is not ultimately sustainable due to eventual depletion of the fossil energy base which supports it.

Whether ‘we’ are to be thankful for this eventuality or not depends upon one’s viewpoint.

The billions who aspire to broaden the mind and see the world (through increased leisure time and international air travel), enjoy the freedom of personal (auto) mobility, cell phones, computers, flat screen TVs, poly cotton clothes, pantyhose, acrylic and enamel paints, piped water and sewerage, domestic space heating, cheap hygienic food packaging and millions of other products and a myriad of life choices offered by our industrial civilization, and above all, freedom from the necessity of toil and physical labour may not share your enthusiasm.

Pol Pot had visions of an agrarian pre industrial idyllic society!

I do follow suggested links to claims of ‘higher’ yields from exclusively ‘organic’ inputs; the reports (most) either lack specific detail from which an energy assessment can be objectively determined, or it is evident that incidental and indirect inputs have not been accounted in the claims.

Excess fixed nitrogen runoff is harmful regardless of source; there is no such thing as ‘natural’ vs. ‘artificial’, it is just that inappropriate application is more likely due to high energy density of commercial ‘fertilisers’ (actually energy inputs; e.g. 600kg ‘commercial’ = 150 metric tones of ‘manure’, nitrogen wise) through misguided attempts by end users lacking knowledge and expertise to increase yield.

1) Oil is thankfully running out, read up on peak oil, end of nitrogen fertilizer from oil, thats a fact.

2) A study published in the August 28 Science ’09 found that nitrous oxide (N2O), also known as laughing gas, and a by-product of agricultural fertilizer and a number of other industrial processes is now the biggest ozone-depleting gas in the air. Destruction of the ozone layer exposes us to dangerous ultraviolet radiation and boosts the risk of skin cancer.

3) Another scientific fact, farmers can produce similar yields from building up the fertility of the soil through modern scientific organic methods (including N2 content) so they don’t need oil based nitrogen fertilizer, and the whole process is better for human health and the environment. Nitrogen fertilizer (oil based) in our ground water is harmful.

Unfortunately your arguments do not stand up to scientific scrutiny or real world conditions. I have seen you have the same argument before on Though Leader. On that occasion you were rebutted you with the same facts.

Hope you read them this time.

No, I mean Nitrogen (N2)

Carbon Dioxide is a trace gas in the atmosphere, currently 0.0004 of the total, whereas nitrogen is abundant, constituting about 4/5ths.

Plants use CO2 (the ‘carbo’) and water (the ‘hydrate’) as feed stocks; and solar plus chemical energy (nitrous compounds) to photosynthesize carbohydrates, which is chemical energy we call ‘food’ (no CO2 = no food!)

Plants pull nitrous compounds out of the soil to go about their business, and when harvested, there is a net loss which must be replenished if cultivation is to continue

Atmospheric nitrogen (N2) is virtually inert, and is not ‘available’ to plants.
It needs to be ‘fixed’ to hydrogen in the form of ammonia (NH4) which is used to ‘fertilize’ i.e. ‘energize’ the ‘soil’ which in turn is a convenient substrate for plant energy exchanges to occur, or more commonly compounded to a nitrate radical (NH4.NO3, ammonium nitrate)

If you doubt that nitrogen compounds have anything to do with ‘energy’ a combination of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane was used by Timothy McVeigh to demolish the federal building in Oklahoma City, and ‘Nitro’ compounds are ubiquitous in ultra high performance motor racing.

Half the available nitrogen today results from ‘organic’ bacteriological processes, and was always the yield limiting factor in all pre industrial agriculture.
The other half is synthesized via the Haber Bosch process, based on fossil energy, and accounts for the doubling of the agricultural potential of our planet.

Thought this and other facts may interest you:

“Most of the world’s food is not produced by industrial megafarms. 75 percent of the world’s food is produced by 1.5 billion small farmers.”

For more interesting stuff plus information from the People’s Food Sovereignty Now! Declaration, November 2009
http://organicconsumers.org/transitions/index.cfm

Guatamala and Honduras showed that by using sustainable agriculture 45 000 people moved from the cities back to farming, they could make a better living there, See – Feeding the World? by Jules Pretty http://ngin.tripod.com/article2.htm

There must also be other non-agrucltural ways to reverse the trends of massive urbanisation and the squalor and suffering that go with it. In addition the above article contains other ‘sustainable farming successes’. The future is not what it used to be, we have to be creative.

Do you mean CO2 instead of nitrogen?
See ‘Organics can save the world from climate chaos’:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_19229.cfm

Blaming mainly regional conflicts and geopolitics is a very limited lens to look at the 800 million starving people in the world. See 2500 page report titled International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development [IAASTD] by 400 experts. It is also the way food is traded, how the environment is devastated, which will only get worse with climate change etc.

If the agricultural system relies on huge subsidies to survive in America and Europe and pumps huge amounts of chemicals into the environment it has failed. There are better agricultural systems.
http://www.ru.org/ecology-and-environment/towards-a-sustainable-agriculture.html

Any civilisation that ignores sustainablity of its environment, economy, health systems etc. will dissappear.