sustainability...

[TheGoodEarth]

or we need to look at obtaining resources from off planet.

Like....erm.....Mars??

It is a truth that most people are complete and utter cocks, if being sustainable we could 100% remove ourselves from these idiots I for one would be first in the queue. But that is not going to happen because of all the cocks.

Couldn't agree more, whilst I firmly believe that the vast majority of people are fundamentally good kind people they can be warped by things like materialism, ego, keeping up with the joneses, celebrity culture, status, self importance etc. This is what turns them into cocks!

[greenorelse]

Vitamin B12 is also an issue for vegans

For some people, it's an issue but not everyone - certainly not for me. This isn't meant to be argumentative, sleepyowl, bear with me. My thoughts are thus:

(a) The animal you eat, from which it's argued you get B12, is the middleman (sorry, middleperson). B12 is produced by bacteria in the soil.

(b) You actually need miniscule amounts of B12, really really tiny amounts.

(c) Anyone consuming large quantities of fresh veg. and salad will get enough B12 if they don't sterilise their food. For instance, I've never peeled potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips and the like. I eat all the skin after washing the veg. I've no doubt there are lingering traces of soil in there - a 'peck of dirt' - and I have no doubt at all that it doesn't harm you, in fact, it makes you stronger. You could say there's a risk - but hey, there's a risk getting out of bed.

How many people eat food out in the garden, freshly picked? I do. Is it clean and totally free from soil? Doubtful.

(d) We drink water from our deep well. It's been tested and it's not perfect water. Good! That means my immune system is being challenged constantly. I also think there will be miniscule amounts of beneficial substances in the water, including occasionally B12.

What do you think?

[greenorelse]

"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"

I have never liked that definition because it is (probably intentionally) vague.

[rant]
Sustainability means zero net consumption of resources. If you use it, you put it back. 100% recycling of everything. I would make one exception for sunlight, because it is a net input to the Earth. Everything else consists of material substances, and is all we have got to work with.

Zero net consumption of material resources is difficult to do. It is impossible with the world's current population at any standard of living. It is impossible at any population level with the current western standard of living. Yet it is essential to achieve it or else the whole system, rich and poor alike, comes tumbling down.

Imagine you live on a small island, like I do. Imagine that there is no ferry. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. You live with what you have or you die. If you can't make it, you can't get it. How would we live in that situation? How many of us could live there?

That is in fact how the Earth works, yet we haven't been asking those questions or seeing that reality.

I don't think the Brundtland Commission's definition even comes close to suggesting the reality of sustainability.
[/rant]

The common statement, though not perfect, has the advantage of brevity. However your post says it in more practical terms. I've often said to people that we should eat nothing coming from outside the island. I'm happy to admit that that might make a vegan diet seem more impracticable to some though I can't concede it entirely.

For instance, last night we had a stew. Potatoes, parsnips, carrots, broad beans, garlic, onions, turnip, bay leaf, parsley, rosemary, thyme - all veganically grown a few metres outside the back door. We had it with bread made with flour grown organically in the next county to us. Think about it.

[crowsashes]

i agree with the sterility of produce - a bit of dirt is always good and a doctor even told me that with the little picking his nose and well you know ... is actually GOOD for him as it gives you a 'hit' of bacteria filtered out by your nose... now i dont know weather or not to take his word as gospel but this winter is the first time little one has been really ill ( flu as you'd guess!) as in not wanting to move ill. surely it cant be a coincidence that LO and i eat raw un peeled veg (he picks his nose) and were both usually the dirtiest people ( clean but covered in mud ) and rarely get ill?

[greenorelse]

Thoughtful ,considered,and hard to disagree with.Just a thought though,if people are too stupid,ignorant ,blind etc to volantarily choose a sustainable future and vote for it,is a measure of authoritarianism justifiable? Beneficial?

Yes. The planet is the authority. We're defying her.

[greenorelse]

i agree with the sterility of produce - a bit of dirt is always good and a doctor even told me that with the little picking his nose and well you know ... is actually GOOD for him as it gives you a 'hit' of bacteria filtered out by your nose... now i dont know weather or not to take his word as gospel but this winter is the first time little one has been really ill ( flu as you'd guess!) as in not wanting to move ill. surely it cant be a coincidence that LO and i eat raw un peeled veg (he picks his nose) and were both usually the dirtiest people ( clean but covered in mud ) and rarely get ill?

Sorry to hear that crowsashes. Flu is crap, isn't it?

On the sterility issue, some people will get ill with less-than-sterile food - but the majority will benefit from not being so pampered. The cynic in me says that in the health and safety panic over cleanliness could easily backfire. Even as the few who might have become ill are protected, the majority's resistance is lowered.

Then there's the money to made out of hygiene fear. Isn't there some handwash now where you don't touch the handwash bottle itself, is some battery-operated dispenser. Errrmm - what's wrong with touching the dispenser? (In fact, what's wrong with a flippin' bar of soap?) Aren't you going to wash your hands after all?

[crowsashes]

yes what is wrong with a bar of soap! again its another product that has been around for centuries. maybe that is what we should be aiming for?

instead of all this hi-tech rubbish we fill our homes with maybe we should be going back to simpler ways of doing things?

i read a fantastic article to do with design ( it was in one of the monthly journals and cant for the life of me remember which one) and basically one of the ways to get us out of this mess is to use simple design to re-structure our ways of living. it is idealistic but it could easily be implemented by willing communities.

its main points were to go against the individualistic ideal behind design at the moment with personal products and go more community centered. setting up community kitchens ( use less resources to heat one large oven where 6-8 families can cook dinner) than 8 individual ones. this probably wouldn't work on a large scale like in a city BUT has it been even tried? i know it sounds very idealistic but there were many other examples- such as tool sharing, skill sharing.

the only way i can see things becoming sustainable is to think completely beyond the self. with this current climate where things are very tight it may just be viable , but only just. we are having to rely more on other people to help us through the worst of this and i cant help but think it could be a good thing.

[The Riff-Raff Element]

I suspect strongly that a lot of the talk of doom originates from the belief (widely held, though probably not on here) that efficient modern farming with big tractors, lots of petroleum based chemicals, GMOs, global trade in foodstuffs & fertilisers and as few hedgerows as possible is all that stands between us and mass starvation.

This is not really true.

Modern industrial farming is “more efficient” in only one way: cost. And this will last only for as long as oil is cheaper than human labour.

For producing the maximum amount of food from the minimum amount of space (and, usually, with the minimum amount of input, except for sweat) there is no substitute for a more horticultural approach.

Of course in those parts of the world where labour is still cheaper than oil, one can see ample evidence of this. I’m thinking here of the small farms of SE Asia where rice paddies are combined with carp farming and duck rearing in the dykes that irrigate them or of the “dry farming” of maize, beans, squash and other crops still practiced by the likes of the Navajo in the South Western US.

I’m personally pretty confident that the world is more than capable of feeding itself without highly mechanised agriculture, agrochemicals and the air freighting of green beans from Kenya.

My own belief is that small-scale mixed farming is the route by which this can be achieved. I think animals need to be included in this because they provide the means by which nitrogen and minerals collected by haymaking on permanent pasture (no fertiliser factories, remember) can be cashed.

That said, it is abundantly clear that the routine feeding of large amounts of concentrates (cereals, pulses) to livestock cannot be sustained in such a system, which means rather less meat and dairy in the diet.

Which probably won't do us any harm.

[Susie]

(c) Anyone consuming large quantities of fresh veg. and salad will get enough B12 if they don't sterilise their food.

I'm honestly not doubting what's working for you, but, this isn't actually true, and all the advice from vegan organisations is to supplement, as far as I'm aware.

[grahamhobbs]

Well said Riff-Raff, if the land was shared out more equally every family in Britain could have 3 acres of agricultural land, more than sufficient to feed themselves on. They could be self-sufficent and still have 3 or 4 days a week to work at something else.
Currently we only produce about 50% of our food.

Current farming methods are not efficient they merely make a profit for people who in the main own large tracts of land. And 80% (80% of 50%) of our food (by monetary value?) is produced on 20% of agricultural land, the other 80% is considered marginal in terms of it being profitable and is therefore under utilised.

[greenorelse]

its main points were to go against the individualistic ideal behind design at the moment with personal products and go more community centered. setting up community kitchens ( use less resources to heat one large oven where 6-8 families can cook dinner) than 8 individual ones. this probably wouldn't work on a large scale like in a city BUT has it been even tried? i know it sounds very idealistic but there were many other examples- such as tool sharing, skill sharing.

What about this sort of thing: http://www.lancastercohousing.org.uk

[greenorelse]

(c) Anyone consuming large quantities of fresh veg. and salad will get enough B12 if they don't sterilise their food.

I'm honestly not doubting what's working for you, but, this isn't actually true, and all the advice from vegan organisations is to supplement, as far as I'm aware.

Yes, I was aware of that article and I've read Stephen Walsh's definitive book Plant Based Nutrition several times. I have immense respect for him. He doesn't take into account that miniscule amount consumed in the way I mentioned apart from mentioning raw food diets, which I don't know enough about.

So I'll take your post as a caution and maybe write to him and see what he thinks. Certainly, I'll ask for MMA levels to be tested next time I have a blood test.

[oldjerry]

[quote="grahamhobbs"]Well said Riff-Raff, if the land was shared out more equally every family in Britain could have 3 acres of agricultural land, more than sufficient to feed themselves on.


DIs that arable land Graham? Much more than I realised.If so ,then actually a larger pop. could be supported than at present.
Most people gauge how much land a family needs to be self sufficient from Seymour. Well the old bloke ,(from his own admission(Home service phone in circa 1975 ) was a writer who considered himself an average farmer. From my experience, I would suggest that if you were any good(and that means goats for dairying,something he disliked through irrational predjudice) you could get by with little more than an acre.

[okra]

It's amazing how much food, from my experience, you can grow with one allotment if you use all available space, intercrop and plan plan and plan again. One acre would definately enough to feed a family

[sleepyowl]

Greenoreise I agree with what you are saying but how many vegans don't grow their own food & have to rely on shop bought & with all the prissiness of everything needing to be sterile, very few things are sold with soil on them. I only said it was a consideration & it is a problem I have come across on several occasions with people being in that boat who have needed to take suppliments. Not all vegans have the same resources you do.

But I stand by everything I have said. agroforestry, Eskimos, the lot