Thursday, May 7, 2020

Beyond death and beyond waste


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Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Vertical Agriculture


I made this for my sustainable agriculture class.
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Not all water use has the same impact

I wanted to quickly talk about agriculture and the difference between blue water, green water, and grey water, and why that complicates talking about the water footprint of different foods. First of all, the concept of Virtual Water is that it is intended to measure the total amount of water used during the production of goods and services. But whether using that amount of water is sustainable or not depends on where production is done, and where the water comes from. Is the region water-rich or water-poor? Is the source self-replenishing or finite? What of the pollutants in the wastewater? The Water Footprint is more detailed, and looks at the water's source and the impact of nitrates in agricultural runoff. To do this, water is divided into blue water, green water, and grey water. A large blue water footprint is worse than a large green water footprint, and the grey water footprint should be as small as is practical.
https://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/707999779610689537/1240/10/scaletowidth
Here, blue water refers to both surface water and groundwater. In terms of agriculture, this usually encompasses all of the sources for irrigation water other than rain barrels and recycled household water (which confusingly is called "grey water" in other contexts). Surface water includes lakes and river. This water can be depleted if used at an unreasonable rate. (For example, the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea, which is a disaster for the life that once teemed at the fertile river delta (Zielinski, 2010).) This requires a whole discussion about river flow, snowpack, dams, diversions, and artificial lakes and reservoirs and their impact on ecology; suffice it to say that using blue water is problematic, but how problematic depends on how much is used. Groundwater includes both water from rechargeable aquifers and non-rechargeable aquifers (the latter is also called "fossil water" and should be used as a last resort; rechargeable aquifers should not be depleted faster than their recharge rate, which varies). Green water is the moisture held in soil from rainfall. It is an important agricultural input, but provided free by nature, is self-replenishing, and if not used by agricultural crops will be taken up by other plants. Grey water, in this paradigm, is the amount of water required to safely dilute nitrogen runoff from crops. When it comes to water pollution this measurement is only scratching the surface, and is also hard to measure without making a lot of assumptions. As you can see, when evaluating water consumption, a higher green water to blue and grey water ratio is important. That means that not just what is grown, but where, and how food is grown all need to be considered when looking at the water footprint of food.
Also, irrigation water sourced by desalination doesn't have the same type of impact that other forms of blue water do. Since this is a highly energy-consumptive practice that in effect creates fresh water where it had not existed before, the source of the energy matters, as well as how brine is disposed of or returned to the sea. In desert regions desalination for agriculture is becoming increasingly relevant.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0167779915002723-gr1b1.jpg
There are also water-efficient and water-inefficient ways of irrigating crops. Flooding rice fields can use a great deal of water - especially compared to some of the most sophisticated irrigation systems, which can sense soil moisture and deliver precision water and nutrient directly to the plant roots with drip irrigation or, better yet, subsurface irrigation.
The final thing I'd like to bring up is that when food grown with unsustainable blue water is imported by a country that has a lot of rainwater resources, this is not a good use of the Earth's water resources. Why would this happen? Perhaps because labor can be less expensive in countries at latitudes that just happen to be drier (for example, Mexico in comparison to the U.S.). We can end up with a social justice issue, especially when the economics between regions are asymmetrical, where wealthy countries can pressure poor countries to use up their finite water resources just to sell enough agricultural produce, water-intensive foods like beef, and other goods with a lot of embedded water, likes clothes or electronics, to pay off their debts.
https://waterfootprint.org/media/medialibrary/2015/04/VirtualWT1.png?e=1
That thick arrow you see coming from the U.S. is mostly wheat and corn grown with blue water from the rapidly-depleting Ogallala Aquifer, by the way. This isn't happening to pay off debt; it's because the U.S. subsidizes agriculture for export, and this is the result. Here's a good article about aquifer depletion in the U.S. if you want to find out more: https://modernfarmer.com/2015/07/ogallala-aquifer-depletion/ (Links to an external site.)
Zielinski, S. (2010, October). The Colorado River runs dry. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-colorado-river-runs-dry-61427169/ (Links to an external site.)
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Thursday, April 23, 2020

Hot Water

I use a solar shower when I travel; it's pretty impressive how comfortably warm the water gets. Though if you want to wash long hair, you have to be quick or you'll have to rinse with a spare bottle of cold water.
I know this really handsome guy who used to heat his outdoor pool by looping water-filled black-painted garden hoses on the roof. The hose was connected to the output of the pool filter pump and once warmed, the water flowed back into the pool. The pump timer was set to run each day for several hours. It worked!
There are also methods of using water that's been heated on the roof through a solar collector. One way to use the heated water is to allow it to flow through a heat exchanger, so that its heat can be distributed to heat rooms inside your house. Hot water can be used to heat air, which is then distributed throughout the living space by HVAC; warm water can be circulated through tubes in floors and walls, which then radiated into the rooms; or hot water could heat a space using a traditional radiator system. Hot water generated by a solar collector can also be used for washing and showering rather than for space heating.
Here's a diagram of the flat-plate solar collector that sits on the roof:
As you can see, water flows through tubes that are sandwiched between a cover and a layer of insulation. Solar energy heats the water while the insulated box minimizes how much heat is transferred to the ambient environment before the water flows into the house. After the heat leaves the water, it returns to the solar collector to be heated again, in a closed loop. Flat plate collectors can hold onto about 60% of the solar energy they collect, depending on how much glazing (which doesn't let IR back out) and insulation used. This works well if water needs to be heated from between ten to fifty degree Celsius above the outside temperature, but in cold climates more glazing and insolation may be need, or for even more efficiency (and therefore hotter water), evacuated tube systems or parabolic troughs may be preferable. Parabolic troughs focus sunlight on a tube carrying the medium being heated. Parabolic troughs concentrate more sunlight on less fluid; in favorable sun conditions they get water hot enough to boil, but these systems are more complicated to deal with when sun-tracking systems are employed. Often the working fluid being heated is either pressurized water (pressurized because it needs to be kept in its liquid phase) or a medium that freezes at low temperatures; a heat exchanger is therefore necessary to transfer the heat to the water in the house.
Water is great for storing energy because it has a high specific heat capacity. Though it takes a longer time (more energy) to heat water up to a certain temperature compared to other materials, water also holds more energy per degree a given mass is heated, and cools more slowly than many other materials such as concrete. (The fact that water takes a long time to heat up and cool down is one reason coastal areas have milder climates: the ocean stays cooler than the land during summer, providing a cool sea breeze, but the ocean also holds onto the massive amount of heat that's been slowly absorbed during the hot summer days; since water doesn't radiate heat off into space nearly as quickly as land areas do, the ocean gently warms the coast during the winter because it's warmer by comparison.) This suggests another way to keep a building's interior warm using water: use columns of water as a thermal mass. Solar heat could be stored in other thermal masses, such as slabs of concrete or containers of sand, but since water gives up its heat more slowly it keeps the interior comfortable for a longer time after the sun has set. This can be incorporated into a passive solar home design and works with no mechanical parts.
https://www.howtogosolar.org/media/posts/6/water-tube-blue-solar-heat-storage.jpg
Solar energy can also be used to make a still, and thus purify water so it's safe to drink. Water doesn't need to be distilled to be made safe from microbial contamination; it can be pasteurized by heating it up to 65 degrees Celsius for six minutes. This is useful in places that don't have a safe water supply, saves on biomass fuel often used to heat water otherwise, and generates no smoke or exhaust. 
Solar energy can be desalinate seawater, and then that water can be used to grow food. We can cover the whole FEW Nexus in one installation - this one of the great uses for Concentrating Solar Power. In this system, mirrors concentrate sunlight on a central tower; heat energy is used to boil water; the distillate is used to grow hydroponic crops, and the heat is used to keep greenhouses warm at night. If nutrients are sources from composted organic waste and water is recycled through the hydroponic system, this closes loops. This method is already being used to grow tomatoes in the Australian desert at Sundrop Farms.
Is there anything that water, sunlight and plant growth can't accomplish together?
In this geodesic greenhouse design, the above-ground pond can be used to raise fish for aquaculture, which provides nutrients to the plants grown in the greenhouse. The plants then purify the water for the fish. The glazing traps heat energy inside the structure, which is moderated by vents and a central air system powered by solar energy. Water, food and energy work together as a system.
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Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Water Wars?

70% of the fresh water used by people is used to grow food. As can be seen from this 2019 graph (Qin et al.), agricultural grasses consume the lion's share of fresh water; rice alone accounts for 20% of freshwater resources used by humanity, followed by wheat at 14% and maize at 5%, with all other annuals accounting for 27% of use. Livestock accounts for 1%, but this does not include the water to grow feed nor the polluted water that results from stockyard runoff. Thermal power production consumes just 1% of fresh water, however reservoir management consumes 21%, and this includes the hefty chunk (more than 2/3 of that 21%) that is used to generate hydroelectric power.
Running water through turbines is not itself consumptive of water, but the massive dams that have been constructed to facilitate power generation and to create reservoirs to hold irrigation water - which accounts for 14% of the water used in reservoir management - have consequences for downstream ecosystems. They can also worsen geopolitical conflicts in situations where enemy nations share a river basin. India and Pakistan have experienced ongoing violence over the Kashmir region, and the waters of the Ravi River are a pawn in this struggle. The Mekong River has its headwaters in China, and flows through five countries in Southeast Asia – China has already dammed it eleven times (Hutt, 2019). With the power to divert the flow entirely, China has the ability to threaten rice irrigation in several countries.
If there are water wars, it is likely to be due to dams across rivers that slow the flow of water across borders, the exhaustion or pollution of shared aquifers, or attempts to privatize water such that consumers can no longer afford water they need to grow food and run their households. Water can also be a weapon of conflict, as can any necessary resource – cutting off the enemy's access to supplies was the point of an old-fashioned siege. Destruction of water resources can also be an indirect result of conflict; war is filthy.

Imagine having no running water, no sewer connection, and to be legally required to pay a private company to use a well you've already dug. Imagine, instead of turning on a tap, buying contaminated water off a truck every day, which could cost almost half of the money you make (see Cochabamba, Bolivia, where a foreign corporation was physically thrown out of town). Imagine if it was illegal to collect the rain. Why would this happen? Corrupt public officials can make money selling of public assets to private companies, which then sell monopolized resources back to a desperate public at inflated prices; or, the World Bank and the IMF can make water privatization a condition of loans they make to developing governments (Collier, 2015). This can lead to misery, public unrest, and in some cases riots. In the U.S., local governments grappling with aging, leaky infrastructure can also be tempted to privatize city water systems (to varying degrees – a typical model is the PPP, or public-private partnership) just to raise the huge amount of capital it takes for massive restoration projects, and it doesn't always go as planned (see Atlanta City, where a privatized water system was returned to government control).
Water riot in Detroit. https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/images/2014/7/22//2014722165452669734_20.jpg
Lakes, shorelines and rivers create wetlands where the water meets the land in an incredibly fertile overlap where nutrient-rich silt drops out of slow-moving water on flood plains, tidal flats, and estuaries. Dams hold this silt back, interfere with natural flooding cycles, prevent aquatic life from passing across them in many cases, and generally impoverish the wetlands that the rivers feed. Wetlands are a nursery for birds and fish, protect shorelines from storm surges, store water during wet times of year that are released in the summer to nurture aquatic life, sequester massive amounts of carbon if left undisturbed, and, most of all, naturally purify water as it slowly moves through their soils and vegetation. A threat to rich estuarial zones is eutrophication, and wetlands can help absorb the excess nutrients that tend to concentrate at the mouths of rivers or in lakes due to fertilizer runoff from farms (Paludan et al, 2002).
https://www.dailynews.lk/sites/default/files/news/2018/02/27/z_p11-Protecting.jpg
The marshland formed at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq has long been the home of an ancient civilization and was probably the site of the mythical Garden of Eden, but it was drained by Saddam Hussein to punish political enemies. After the wetland was partially restored (after every living thing was reduced to dust), water levels again started to fall and became too salty – thanks to a 60% reduction in river flow due to dam construction by Turkey and Iran (Schwartzstein, 2015). Half of the world's wetlands have already been destroyed, but the loss of this World Heritage Site in Iraq was like losing humanity's homeland. Hopefully it can recover - but what of the other magical places where floods kiss the earth with an explosion of life, with deep, rich soil, and with protection from the rage of the sea? As these ecosystems are needed more than ever to handle increased pollution loads, protect land from increasingly severe typhoons, and shelter breeding shorebirds, fish and shellfish at a time when habitat loss and overfishing are resulting in dwindling populations, wetlands are also more threatened than ever by clearing for farming and dams.
And what about water that is exported within food and consumer goods like cotton, moving hidden inside imports from one part of the world to another? Is it fair for wealthy and water-rich countries to buy cheap clothes made from water-intensive cotton cultivation and cloth dying from impoverished, water-poor regions (in part because the labor's cheap)? And it's not just consumption that's the problem; according to Fluence, "It is estimated that 20% of industrial water pollution (Links to an external site.) worldwide is associated with garment manufacturing, and 85% of that is associated with the fabric dying process" (Fluence News Team, 2018).
I feel that the issues presented here only scratch the surface of challenges to freshwater availability. Glacier and snowpack-fed water sources are threatened by climate change. Aquifers are being depleted by water bottling companies. Improvements in water-efficient agriculture are helpful, as are water treatment techniques that rely on microbes, plants, bivalves and fish. Still, forests are still being clearcut or burned to make room for agriculture and development - these micro-climate-generating natural water treatment "plants" are perhaps the key to the protection of our watersheds. When rainforests are cleared, they don't grow back – they are replaced with savannah. It turns out that not only do these forests need the rain, they also generate it, and when they're gone the land dries out. There is a tipping point past which the remaining rainforests no longer generate the microclimate they need to survive (Amigo, 2020).
https://www.americanforests.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Water1.jpg
To make a very long story short: if humanity wants to protect freshwater resources, we should change the way we use dams, protect and restore wetlands (in part by allowing rivers to return to natural flow and flood patterns), protect forests, and plant trees. Changing the way we grow food from using irrigated monocultures to urban agriculture and Permaculture would have a huge positive impact. We need to recycle our greywater, replace our lawns with gardens and native species, and protect our waterways from polluted stormwater and agricultural runoff. And I haven't even told you about rain gardens yet – here's a blog about making one: https://trulyhouseraingarden.blogspot.com/ (Links to an external site.)
I made this rain garden at the Cascadia College/University of Washington campus in 2019 - you should see it in the summer, it's full of trees taller than I am now!
References
Amigo, I. (2020, February 25). When will the Amazon hit a tipping point? Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00508-4
Collier, V. (2015). Corrupt water privatization schemes: U.S. Citizens mobilize against corporate water grabs. Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://www.globalresearch.ca/corrupt-water-privatization-schemes-u-s-citizens-mobilize-against-corporate-water-grabs/5430999 (Links to an external site.)
Fluence News Team. (2018, November 5). The water footprint of the blue jean. Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://www.fluencecorp.com/blue-jeans-water-footprint/
Hutt, D. (2019). Water war risk rising on the Mekong. Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://asiatimes.com/2019/10/water-war-risk-rising-on-the-mekong/ (Links to an external site.)
Paludan, C., Alexeyev, F. E., Drews, H., Fleischer, S., Fuglsang, A., Kindt, T., … Wolter, K. (2002). Wetland management to reduce Baltic Sea eutrophication. Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12079128
Schwartzstein, P. (2015, July 9). Iraq's Famed Marshes Are Disappearing-Again. Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/07/150709-iraq-marsh-arabs-middle-east-water-environment-world/#close
Qin, Y., Mueller, N. D., Siebert, S., Jackson, R. B., Aghakouchak, A., Zimmerman, J. B., Tong, D., Hong, C., Davis, S. J. (2019). Flexibility and intensity of global water use. Nature Sustainability, 2(6), 515–523. doi: 10.1038/s41893-019-0294-2
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Wednesday, March 11, 2020

John Barleycorn is Dead

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B6yfigBCIAI9nVu.jpg
This week's lecture was challenging for me. I've been exposed to ideas that helped me understand the degradation to water supplies, including through pollution of surface water and depletion of groundwater, destruction of living soil, destruction of ecosystems, and the simplification of the diet that comes through industrialized agriculture and consumption of processed foods. But I'm also semi-indoctrinated by a near-religious reverence for the agricultural cycle (and its odd subtheme of human sacrifice, if you really want to get into it). So I want to talk about hoarding, wealth, domestication, servitude, private property, standing armies, and pyramidal power structures. And maybe beer, perhaps the most seductive product of the granary of all. I will argue that relying on grain cultivation gave rise to banks (and thus usury and concentrated wealth independent of labor), invasion and conquest, bureaucracy, centralized government, the feudal class structure, slavery as an institution, industrialization, and that ultimately this way of life drove us to split the atom and inadvertently poison Ukraine (which has long been the bread basket of Eastern Europe). But for me this is something of a thought experiment.
Manna from Heaven
When the Israelites left Egypt in Exodus 16, they were leaving a civilization made rich by agriculture. As Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute says, "The work at Edfu is important and innovative in that it finally allows us to examine ancient Egypt as an urban society, whose cities and towns housed bureaucrats, craft specialists, priests, and farmers. Nadine Moeller's discovery of silos and local administrative buildings shows us how these cities actually functioned as places where the agricultural wealth of the Nile valley was mobilized for the state. Grain as currency provided the sinews of power for the pharaoh" (Moeller, 2008). Since grain was a form of currency, silos were probably the first banks. In a hunter-gatherer society, wealth was difficult to hoard; but with the rise of agriculture, wealth could not only be stored up, it could be loaned at interest and accumulated without labor. Unfortunately, great wealth draws attention, and Egypt was conquered by the Greeks and then again by Rome, who needed its vast agricultural wealth to feed its city; it was the breadbasket of the Byzantine Empire for a time.
Wealth was not all that was hoarded however. Banks needed accounts kept, which probably gave rise to mathematics and writing, and ultimately libraries, where knowledge was hoarded. The ability of humanity to pass its accumulated knowledge from generation to generation may well be thanks to agriculture. It is also likely that calendars were first devised to time planting and harvest; but with the knowledge of time came worry for the future and an awareness of the inevitability of death, which may well have kicked off the Egyptian preoccupation with the afterlife and immortality. Wealth and death were so interlinked that Hades/Pluto was god of both the underworld and death in Greek and Roman civilizations. And after all, grain, the basis of wealth, grows from the ground, most lushly where blood has been spilled or dead matter has been plowed under. We'll talk about Osiris, Egyptian god of the Dead, in a second.
Something interesting happens when you hoard grain: it ferments. With the rise of agriculture came beer, which was used to pay Egyptian laborers and was considered a source of nutrition (Marks, 2018). Perhaps you could say that early civilization ran on beer. Egypt also cultivated the opium poppy, it must be said.
Meanwhile, during the exodus Moses kept his people fed with manna from Heaven. This could not be hoarded, because it would spoil in a day. The New Testament also cautioned against hoarding wealth, requiring that it be given to the poor. Hoarding is antithetical to faith. From the Book of Matthew 6:26: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" On the other hand, Jesus manifested loaves to feed his crowds of listeners and compared his body to bread, offering it as a sacrament. Both bread and wine are "transformed" by yeast, which could show the transformative effect of the Spirit on human consciousness. It's complicated. Let us say that symbolically speaking, transformed bread removes the stain of Original Sin, which invoked God's curse of agriculture onto humanity in the first place.
Osiris and the Hall of Judgment
https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/Outer-coffin-of-Taywheryt-depicting-Osiris.jpg?itok=kslnvaKh
Osiris, Egyptian god of the Underworld, was said to have taught humanity agriculture. He was also the symbolic father of the Pharoah, and represented the stability of the monarchy. In mythology his body was torn apart by his brother Set and thrown in a river, and he was reassembled and brought back to life by his wife, Isis. As an agricultural deity, he was torn apart on the threshing-room floor, and brought back to life with the flooding of the Nile. It is interesting that again the god of resurrection and grain is also the god who judges the soul after death. He was said to have taught humanity religion and morality (McDermott, 2019), but his greatest blessing is not food – it's immortality in the Western Land, granted only to those whose soul's heart weighs less than a feather. Interestingly, his sacrament was bread and beer. (Beer was also the only thing that could calm the homicidal fury of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, but that's for another time). So we could say that the god of agriculture founded a death cult, or alternatively that he spiritualized man's nature by granting immortality to the just. Either way, he certainly backed the centralized seat of power in the land.
Inanna, Goddess of Fertility and War
Inanna (also called Ishtar and Astarte) was a Mesopotamian goddess of agriculture (her symbol was a knot of reeds), ritual marriage/sex to bless the land with plenty, and war. She visited the Underworld, was killed by her sister, was resurrected by another god, and then sacrificed her husband (who was a shepherd) to descend there for half of the year (a reference to the seasons). She also relates to slavery; in the image above, she is presenting captives of war to the king. She has a vengeful nature, lusts for power, and . . . likes her field plowed. Battle became known as the Dance of Inanna. Here the goddess of vegetation is not the goddess of death, she is the Queen of Heaven who tried to *conquer* the underworld and in so doing inadvertently brought winter to the Earth. This is a drastically different image than the more lugubrious story of Isis and Osiris, but the theme of the Earth's vegetation ceasing to grow when the male and female principles are separated by death is familiar. However, it is so dissimilar from the story of Christ that they don't even have fermented beverages in common. This early image of agriculture is barely civilized; in fact, one version of this figure fell in love with the Wild Man, Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, representing the hunter-gatherer culture, rejected the early queen of civilization and agriculture, so she sent the Bull of Heaven to smite him - and the Wild Man won! Times have changed.
The Rape of Persephone
A more depressing version of the journey of the fertility-bestowing goddess to the Underworld is the abduction of Persephone, the goddess of Spring. She was the daughter of the Greek goddess of the grain, Ceres, and was taken by Hades, the god of the dead. After Ceres in her grief caused all growth and reproduction on the Earth to cease, through negotiations she had her daughter returned to her for half the year, which is the time when crops can grow again. This mythological link between agriculture, captivity and death is quite blatant. In this mythological universe the wildness of fermentation is given to Dionysos, who reigned in the winter, after the harvest. In some stories, Persephone is the mother of Dionysos. Dionysos, like Osiris, was torn to pieces, but unlike him, was also consumed and then resurrected from his heart. The human sacrifice was literalized by his followers, the Maenads, who were said to go mad and tear men to pieces in a frenzy. A lot could be read into this pair of tales; the fact that they have been separated could be a reference to the split between nomadic hunters and gatherers (Dionysos was a wanderer) from sedentary farmers. Note that where beer and bread have been staples of civilization's domestication under a centralized power, wine recalls wildness, independence and lawlessness.
Hunters of the Granary
It's interesting that while dogs are companions of hunters, cats are companions are farmers – they kill pests that eat the grain stores. These animals are considered spooky – probably because they are silent and hunt nocturnally - and are mythologically ambiguous, including coyotes, owls and foxes. These creatures are wild or only partially domesticated and can be tricksters.
Bread and Circuses 
https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/2017/05/gladiator_-_h_-_2000.jpg
From the Romans to the Soviets, if you want to control a mob, you do it through its stomach. An army also marches on its stomach. If you want people who don't think for themselves, feed them the same thing every day, provide it for them from storehouses, and make them earn it through repetitive drudgery (farming and milling). If nobility (or the State) owns the land that serfs farm for them, you can tax the farmers to feed the city folk and nobles, you can treat them as property, recruit them as soldiers, and afflict them with famine if they get unruly (you just get armed men to take the entire harvest, as the Soviets did to the Ukrainians during the Holodomor). You can also stop them from entering the forests to find food, reserving these as game preserves for the privileged. The folk hero reply to this state of affairs? Robin Hood. People who didn't want to be used this way became outlaws. But the reply to that is the Spectacle: punishment as a sport, recruiting the peasants to the side of the law through various bloody exhibitions.
Blood and Soil
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcSr9DkcH1-pgTVgQ7RXCD4KPFBautl7L8x6ttki12yG-MFMnW6n
Hunger, though, gives rise to fascism. After the harsh reprisals against Germany following the Great War, the Nazis rose to power. They conquered Europe and used slave labor to farm. WWII led to the development of the atomic bomb, which led to nuclear power, which led to Chernobyl and poisoned the earth. Meanwhile, greater and greater wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The earth is far more productive with far fewer people farming it. We no longer know where our food comes from, and in the age of the machine we are nearly continuous with our devices. Consciousness was once felt as continuous with all living things for nomadic hunter-gatherers; it is now continuous with radiation of various kinds (radio and television waves to wi-fi).
Marks, T. (2018). A sip of history: ancient Egyptian beer. Retrieved from https://blog.britishmuseum.org/a-sip-of-history-ancient-egyptian-beer/ (Links to an external site.)
McDermott, A. (2019). The outstanding story of Osiris: his myths, symbols and significance in ancient Egypt. Retrieved from https://www.ancient-origins.net/human-origins-religions/story-osiris-how-first-ruler-egypt-became-god-underworld-008953 (Links to an external site.)
Moeller, N. (2008, July 1). Archaeologists find silos and administration center from early Egyptian city. Uchigaco News. Retrieved from https://news.uchicago.edu/story/archaeologists-find-silos-and-administration-center-early-egyptian-city (Links to an external site.)
Edited by Oluwa Jackson on Mar 11 at 5:01pm

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Friday, March 6, 2020

The Golden Age

"Because we have replaced nature-based myth with a set of fixed prohibitions relating only to other people, and unrelated to nature, we have developed destructive and people-centered civilisations and religions." (Mollison, 1988, p. 11)
With that in mind, here's a look at some nature-based mythology relating to a god of cultivation.
s3.amazonaws.com/oddfellow/weblog/assets/1526182758.4282.5058_source.jpg (Links to an external site.)
Saturn was the ancient Roman deity of agriculture. He was associated with agriculture and prosperity, but also with time and the cyclic destruction of the harvest. As traditions became less Pagan and more Christian, the figure holding the scythe and the hourglass who reigns at midwinter became less associated with our lost Golden Age and wealth, and more associated with finitude, hardship, labor and death. Saturn continued to be associated with truth, however. When the workings of the Universe started to be compared to a grand clockwork, Time's symbolic role no longer was seen as a warning that we must die and should spend our limited time on Earth preparing for the hereafter. In a newly secular world, whose imagination was captured by the promises of science and technology, the grim figure of Death became conquered by and subordinated to Love (Macey, 1994, p. 210).
i.pinimg.com/originals/f7/0a/ba/f70aba6d143674e8262c314540a9624d.jpg
The connection seems obscure at first until we consider that new life is seeded by sex, and that through physical union worldly destruction is succeeded by regeneration. Thus we come full circle to the indulgent and erotic ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, where Saturn becomes god of misrule and liberation rather than the ascetic figure of finality and judgment. The harvest becomes a time outside of time, much like the Golden Age itself, in which schedules of labor and the rules of society do not apply. The grim reaper now presides over recreation and the joyous satisfaction of appetites, more like Bacchus than Death – the grapes of harvest become the wine of immortality.
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Thus we see hints at the idea that if we understand the mysteries of time and generation well enough, we can conquer death itself. Saturn (like Janus, who also rules at the end of the year - and the beginning of the next), is a god of contradictory qualities seemingly set opposed to one another yet actually giving rise to one another. Order and discipline create the prosperity that makes chaotic celebration possible. Austerity gives rise to pleasure. Silence and darkness give rise to wisdom. To be utterly unmoving is to be everywhere at once. Time becomes timing, the art of finding the opportunity hidden in the moment. Perhaps by respecting time and boundedness by eating what is local and in season, we can experience renewal – a form of limitlessness through limitation. Yet Bill Mollison points out that immutable rules do not apply, and that we need to explore flexible principles and directives (p. 11) – in other words, pay attention to the needs of the time and use our brains to reveal the hidden opportunities. Perhaps if we saw the world as interconnected patterns and living wholes rather than straight furrows marching to the thresher we would eat of the Tree of Life rather than being cut down like the grain. In contrary fashion, the flaming sword that guards the Garden gives not the death of the scythe but the life of the spirit – note that it is placed East of Eden, the aspect of sunrise and renewal – and that it is a tree that holds this promise, not a grassland struggling to root itself in defoliated earth.
i.pinimg.com/originals/d9/1b/62/d91b62847da07e3ce43d6d9e531e37d4.jpg (Links to an external site.)
Thinking about time and death is even more poignant than usual for me right now, because I live in the middle of the COVID-19 outbreak that is happening near Seattle. Memento mori indeed. This outbreak started in a market that sold wildlife for food (a practice supposedly banned), and could be the Revenge of the Pangolins (Links to an external site.), the most poached and trafficked animal in the world, now functionally extinct in China. Its meat is a status symbol served to high-level guests. This kind of exploitative relationship with the natural world is the antithesis of Permaculture; perhaps the virus is a flaming sword of justice.
Macey, S. L. (1994). Encyclopedia of time. New York, NY: Garland Publishing.
Mollison, B. (1988). Permaculture: a designers manual. Tyalgum: Tagari Publ.
Yu, W. (2020, March 5). Coronavirus: Revenge of the pangolins? The New York Times. Retrieved March 6, 2020 from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opinion/coronavirus-china-pangolins.html
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