The Green Room

[PedalUma]

I can imagine seeding bamboo mats with seaweed. They would self-float without a buoy and self-sink. The bamboo is itself fast growing, sequestering carbon. It would be cool if it could trap plastics and sink them also to slowly go under the seabed to become crude oil in 90,000 years. Yes it is a technological fix. But it is using natural processes.

 

[john peck]

I can imagine seeding bamboo mats with seaweed. They would self-float without a buoy and self-sink. The bamboo is itself fast growing, sequestering carbon. It would be cool if it could trap plastics and sink them also to slowly go under the seabed to become crude oil in 90,000 years. Yes it is a technological fix. But it is using natural processes.
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Folks hereabout are growing a lot of bamboo. I planted some this year myself. Thereś a neat trick to
getting the roots deeper quickly. Make the hole deeper than you´d plant & slant a tube of 1¨ pvc pipe
into the bottom of the hole below actual planting depth. After planting & initial waterings, water & feed
into the tube. This makes roots go deeper fast & hastens growth considerably. My black bamboo is doing
great in spite of the freak heat wave here that seemed to kill Groot & Greta on the hood of my old Ford.
The good news, those apparently dead plants have made a big comeback with some water. Bonsai !

 

[john peck]

I'm sorry, @Mr. Coffee , but that picture looks like the future. Maybe it's time to move? You know the area and the fires..

The uptick is that all that dry grass kept moisture from reaching the soil & the ash will fertilize it. With a
little rain it will be much greener than before. Cal really needs a program to deal with dry grass, if not
burned, mow it & make compost ahead of fire.

 

[Art Deco]

Folks hereabout are growing a lot of bamboo. I planted some this year myself. Thereś a neat trick to
getting the roots deeper quickly. Make the hole deeper than you´d plant & slant a tube of 1¨ pvc pipe
into the bottom of the hole below actual planting depth. After planting & initial waterings, water & feed
into the tube. This makes roots go deeper fast & hastens growth considerably. My black bamboo is doing
great in spite of the freak heat wave here that seemed to kill Groot & Greta on the hood of my old Ford.
The good news, those apparently dead plants have made a big comeback with some water. Bonsai !

Different climate here, if you plant bamboo, you can just water it once and run. Took me all day a few years ago to eradicate a smallish patch maybe 3' x 4' that took hold in the front garden, probably from a bird dropped seed.
The roots ran so deep it looked like I was digging a grave.

Edit found the link " Bamboo Sports Hall "

Arching bamboo trusses are left exposed in Chiang Mai sports hall to create a "feast to the eye"

Chiangmai Life Architects and Construction modelled the segmented roof of this bamboo sports hall at a school in Thailand on the petals of a lotus flower.

www.dezeen.com

I guess that most of you know how polluting concrete is.

I was reading somewhere about a big modern building made of bamboo that claimed to have absorbed more CO2 growing than was produced by the construction, IDK if I can find a link.

 

[Art Deco]

A friend in N.J. sent an email this morning with the UN Report, asking if it is too late. This is what I told her.

"Yes. It is too late to go backwards. There will be a crash of the current situation and some sort of emergence of something very different, hopefully sustainable. When the very first European explorers set foot on Tasmania the population was 20,000. The people had a material culture that included 15 basic, biodegradable and stone tools. The smallest tool kit ever recorded. The Tasmanians were naked and spent All day Every day singing! There was no treasure, there were no monuments, nor ruins, or dumps, or mines, or farms, or leaders. Just naked people singing all day."

It was the oldest continuous culture on earth.
View attachment 96079

Going to read up on that one. Tasmania isn't anyplace I know anything at all about. Older cultures fascinate me.

 

[PedalUma]

Going to read up on that one. Tasmania isn't anyplace I know anything at all about. Older cultures fascinate me.

People lived there for over 40 thousand years as a culture. They used cold fires to burn small patches of low brush on a regular basis so there were no forest fires and many patches of land were kept open. These fires burned under the canopy so the trees remained. When one group approached another they would mark their approach by setting small fires along the way, which also kept trails clear between groups. California Natives also used fire similarly. The hills were always green. The Europeans brought grasses with them that turned brown.

 

[Art Deco]

People lived there for over 40 thousand years as a culture. They used cold fires to burn small patches of low brush on a regular basis so there were no forest fires and many patches of land were kept open. These fires burned under the canopy so the trees remained. When one group approached another they would mark their approach by setting small fires along the way, which also kept trails clear between groups. California Natives also used fire similarly. The hills were always green. The Europeans brought grasses with them that turned brown.
View attachment 96140

A no mow lawn ? The lawnmower manufacturers and weed and feed manufacturers are going to love that idea. Not.
Suburbs without the racket of ICE mowers, weed wackers, and leaf blowers is probably Un American.

 

[Mulezen]

As the indigenous oral history in both SA and Australia, and also observed by biologists, birds will carry burning branches some distance to light fires for their hunting.
Re: climate change…address it in 1990 at the Paris Accord and the remedial cost exponentially less, the stakes a fraction of what they are now. Then the argument went…we can‘t do this, it’ll put us at a disadvantage. Then the Kochs muddied the waters for many years as they purveyed their dirty cheap coke from Canada to China. This US has singularly held back progress on this matter as business’ pays its pipers in Congress. I’ve thought for many years the only solution is publicly funded elections. But the time for real action has long past, and the ballast of the anti-science crowd makes me pessimistic…very

 

[DaveMatthews]

A no mow lawn ? The lawnmower manufacturers and weed and feed manufacturers are going to love that idea. Not.
Suburbs without the racket of ICE mowers, weed wackers, and leaf blowers is probably Un American.

A guy up the street put in fake grass/artificial lawn in his front yard.
No Mo Lawn!

 

[Art Deco]

A guy up the street put in fake grass/artificial lawn in his front yard.
No Mo Lawn!

There is a true American solution ... cover it in plastic ...

 

[DaveMatthews]

There is a true American solution ... cover it in plastic ...

Back in a few minutes dear... I'm going to go vacuum the lawn!

 

[ChezCheese:)]

You know how every so often, you see an article or TV story about someone who decides to do a project where they don't throw anything away for a year? Like, all the packaging, the food they didn't eat, the broken stuff - - they had to keep it all on their property. They quickly developed strategies to minimize waste and packaging. If I recall correctly, they still had a mtn of waste.

Anyway, I was talking with someone today, and I mentioned that I thought we were already over the precipice and nothing we can do will stop it. She said 40 years ago, she remembered watching a TV interview of a woman who even then tried to get people to see what pollution was doing and she warned of so many of the things which are now coming to pass. The journalist was dubious and of course she was thought to be exaggerating. But she said, "Remember the London fogs/smogs of the 19th century, caused by the Age of Industrialization? And the volcanic eruptions of Krakatao and Vesuvius, etc? And the smoke from all the fires humans ever cooked by and warmed by? It's all still here. It didn't go anywhere. It is still in our environment. It isn't just what we have done in our lifetimes, it's everything that's ever happened: it's cumulative. "

I had never thought of it that way before. It's like those people trying to not throw anything away, but rather to take ownership of and responsibility for all the garbage and detritus their everyday life generates. It's all still here on our home planet. It hasn't gone anywhere.

It's pretty hopeless, actually.

 

[Art Deco]

As the indigenous oral history in both SA and Australia, and also observed by biologists, birds will carry burning branches some distance to light fires for their hunting.
Re: climate change…address it in 1990 at the Paris Accord and the remedial cost exponentially less, the stakes a fraction of what they are now. Then the argument went…we can‘t do this, it’ll put us at a disadvantage. Then the Kochs muddied the waters for many years as they purveyed their dirty cheap coke from Canada to China. This US has singularly held back progress on this matter as business’ pays its pipers in Congress. I’ve thought for many years the only solution is publicly funded elections. But the time for real action has long past, and the ballast of the anti-science crowd makes me pessimistic…very

I don't expect much from Congress (or any elected officials) anymore. I registered as an Independent decades ago. I still believe in and vote in every election, but the choices offered by the RNC/DNC are predictably very poor...maybe no one qualified to deal with trillion dollar budgets wants the job.

Anyway, I expect the battle of the "Red Hats" vs. the "Blue Masks" will keep most of them busy with blaming and shaming for the TV cameras for the rest of their terms.
So we must adapt as well as we can.

I'm trying to figure out what the adaptation costs will be, and finding mostly junk numbers, but I have found enough to guess that those figures do exist and are being concealed, much like the Exon report mentioned by XKCD in the above post.

 

[Art Deco]

You know how every so often, you see an article or TV story about someone who decides to do a project where they don't throw anything away for a year? Like, all the packaging, the food they didn't eat, the broken stuff - - they had to keep it all on their property. They quickly developed strategies to minimize waste and packaging. If I recall correctly, they still had a mtn of waste.

Anyway, I was talking with someone today, and I mentioned that I thought we were already over the precipice and nothing we can do will stop it. She said 40 years ago, she remembered watching a TV interview of a woman who even then tried to get people to see what pollution was doing and she warned of so many of the things which are now coming to pass. The journalist was dubious and of course she was thought to be exaggerating. But she said, "Remember the London fogs/smogs of the 19th century, caused by the Age of Industrialization? And the volcanic eruptions of Krakatao and Vesuvius, etc? And the smoke from all the fires we've ever cooked by and warmed by? It's all still here. It didn't go anywhere. It is still in our environment. It isn't just what we have done in our lifetimes, it's everything that's ever happened: it's cumulative. "

I had never thought of it that way before. It's like those people trying to not throw anything away, but rather to take ownership of and responsibility for all the garbage and detritus their everyday life generates. It's all still here on our home planet. It hasn't gone anywhere.

It's pretty hopeless, actually.

Not hopeless, just very hard.

But you're right about crap piling up; when we go to throw something away, it's worth remembering that there is no such place as 'away ' , and try to never buy something like what we are throwing out ever again.
There is some leverage we have, though. Consumers only generate 15 to 20 percent of total emissions and wastes even in the rich countries, so if consumers cut their consumption and waste by a ton, manufacturers and transport companies cut their waste by 5 tons. It adds up fast, as the lockdowns showed.

 

[PedalUma]

When a big rig pulls into a retail location everything is packed in boxes. Inside the boxes are packing materials such as Styrofoam. Inside that are plastic bags for many items. Many bikes are packed similarly. For example, each pair of bike gloves is in its own plastic bag on freight day. Retailers compress the cardboard into bails, but no one wants the bails because there it too much plastic content in this cardboard to make recycling feasible. The trash is compacted to fit in a big rig to go to the dump. Retailers demand over packing to prevent the slightest flaw when items are put out on display. Then those items often have their own packaging. That is the portion that consumers take home that immediately goes in the garbage. Other countries will no longer take our recycling. According to the Atlantic it is going into the landfill. Manufactures are not paying the cost it is pushed onto the Commons.

 

[john peck]

¨Took me all day a few years ago to eradicate a smallish patch maybe 3' x 4' that took hold in the front garden, probably from a bird dropped seed.The roots ran so deep it looked like I was digging a grave.¨

For it to grew here the roots have to go deep. Plenty. of moisture here, but the soil is leached out, slightly alkaline. Soil here ends

´bout 3 inches down, from there on down, its a concretion of glacial debris.

 

[Art Deco]

When a big rig pulls into a retail location everything is packed in boxes. Inside the boxes are packing materials such as Styrofoam. Inside that are plastic bags for many items. Many bikes are packed similarly. For example, each pair of bike gloves is in its own plastic bag on freight day. Retailers compress the cardboard into bails, but no one wants the bails because there it too much plastic content in this cardboard to make recycling feasible. The trash is compacted to fit in a big rig to go to the dump. Retailers demand over packing to prevent the slightest flaw when items are put out on display. Then those items often have their own packaging. That is the portion that consumers take home that immediately goes in the garbage. Other countries will no longer take our recycling. According to the Atlantic it is going into the landfill. Manufactures are not paying the cost it is pushed onto the Commons.

Agreed. That brings up the point of the tragedy of the commons. Every business will push as many costs as possible into the category of "Externalities" or "Someone Else's Problem".

And business generally requires that the firm minimize what is expensive (labor and resources) by wasting what is cheap or free (externalities) like water, air, biodiversity, etc.

If the businesses we deal with had to pay to remove/recycle all the packaging from all their customers ... there would be a lot less packaging in the world. Quickly.

The whole tragedy of the commons is much too long and involved for a forum post, but once you see it, it's everywhere.

What is air conditioning except a way to cool my private space by blowing the heat out into the atmosphere?

 

[PatriciaK]

And China's pollution probably equals the rest of the world combined.

There's probably data that would either support our disprove that supposition .

 

[PatriciaK]

Hazy smoky air in my corner of the great PNW today... Staying inside with a mask on (because it's too hot to keep the windows closed up with no AC ).

 

[PedalUma]

Agreed. That brings up the point of the tragedy of the commons. Every business will push as many costs as possible into the category of "Externalities" or "Someone Else's Problem".

And business generally requires that the firm minimize what is expensive (labor and resources) by wasting what is cheap or free (externalities) like water, air, biodiversity, etc.

If the businesses we deal with had to pay to remove/recycle all the packaging from all their customers ... there would be a lot less packaging in the world. Quickly.

The whole tragedy of the commons is much too long and involved for a forum post, but once you see it, it's everywhere.

What is air conditioning except a way to cool my private space by blowing the heat out into the atmosphere?

It does happen all the time. It is a design of a type of splitter. The upside goes one direction and the downside goes another. Sometimes responsibility goes to a shell company set up to take the hit. Sometimes it goes to the commons. It all ends up in the commons. I knew of a company that wanted the upside of a jet for executives. So, they set up a Bahamian shell to own the plane's liability. Then they chartered it back from the shell. One classic example is an aquifer. Non resident investors pump out the goodies as fast as the can. Locals don't have water.
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Hazy smoky air in my corner of the great PNW today... Staying inside with a mask on (because it's too hot to keep the windows closed up with no AC ).

I made another of these today. Anyone can. They remove ALL of the indoor air's smoke smell. It costs $0.02 per hour to run. Just recycle an old bike box, tape on twin filters and use a $20 box fan you probably already own. This one has shelf paper on it so you can wipe it with a sponge.