Words of the Lagoon ...on sustainability & culture

[JWFITZ]

Here is a very interesting article that puts the gravity of the issue into perspective, or should.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=12252

[AlohaSteven]

JWFITZ, for everyone else on the globe except real estate agents selling Puna properties this news is cause for deep reflection and whatever form of prayer one subscribes to. Among local real estate agents, however, it could be cause for champagne corks popping.

Has there ever been a better time to buy in Puna than when the local market is tanked and drought stress is predictably about to come riding in (along with the other Four Horsemen) across broad swaths of the Mainland and elsewhere?


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A pleasant slideshow: http://www.thejoymovie.com

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[JWFITZ]

Here is the context in Hawaii. Consider we've lost 30 percent of our available farm land to development in the last decade.
[url]
http://www.farmlandinfo.org/agricultural...stics_view&stateID=HI[/url]

Consider that every time someone puts in a house on a piece of land that grows food, the effect is near double what it appears--not only does one destroy a farm, but one also imports another unsustainable mouth to feed putting yet a higher burden on local food production.

[AlohaSteven]

This equates to stress of several different sorts.

My own experience (see second post to this thread) and some rather unsettling new research findings (linked, following below) suggest the cumulative effects of such stresses --especially in isolated populations coping with multiple issues-- may be persistent across generations.

Two new studies show the effects of a mother's early environment can be passed on to the next generation.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22061/?a=f
Emily Singer in MIT Technology Review
04FEB2009


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A pleasant slideshow: http://www.thejoymovie.com

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[AlohaSteven]

I wonder, if Oahu needed to feed its current population indefinitely from local sustainable agricultural/aquaponic production (either with access to a renewable non-fossil-fuels power source or going without) then could they actually do so?

The City that Ended Hunger did it by going local
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/3/16/114116/636
by Tom Laskawy posting to Grist, 16MAR2009.

"And the cost? $10 million for a city of 2.5 million. Granted, that figure isn't adjusted for US purchasing power -- but it represented a mere 2 percent of the city budget..."



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A pleasant slideshow: http://www.thejoymovie.com

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[gtill]

Note a long going thread for gleaning sweet potatoes on Hamakua coast. Ag does work here, and could be revved up pretty fast, not to suit everyone's taste though.

In the 1970s, there was a Kohala Task Force project that turned most of the land there into corn fields, and quick. Burning for charcoal could provide fertilizer.

Perish the thought but there is enough protein swimming off our shores in turtles, dolphins and an occasional humpback to keep at least the original inhabitants here.

[AlohaSteven]

How would Puna, the Big Island, and Hawaii in general hold up through a Carrington Event?

How would we fare if within a matter of a few minutes the electricity went off -and then stayed off? If the mainland is in chaos then in short order the supply-lines to the islands cease to function.

...it is clear that a repeat of the Carrington event could produce a catastrophe the likes of which the world has never seen. "It's just the opposite of how we usually think of natural disasters," says John Kappenman, a power industry analyst with the Metatech Corporation of Goleta, California, and an advisor to the NAS committee that produced the report. "Usually the less developed regions of the world are most vulnerable, not the highly sophisticated technological regions."

Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe
23MAR2009, by Michael Brooks to New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20...tml?page=1

The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather. There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale. Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, "we haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event", says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859.

As noted by Johannes in Words of the Lagoon (please see the first post in this thread), in the aftermath of such an event places which have preserved the knowledge base and a living, functioning, local cultural tradition of pre-mechanized practices (ranging from food production to transportation to medicine and beyond) will fare better than those places and peoples utterly dependent upon flipping a switch, turning a knob, or going to the corner store for their necessities of life.


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A pleasant slideshow: http://www.thejoymovie.com

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[Rob Tucker]

I was an eagle scout. "Be Prepared" was our motto.

Carrington event?, Smarrington event. You deal with what happens.

[AlohaSteven]

I was an eagle scout. "Be Prepared" was our motto.

Carrington event?, Smarrington event. You deal with what happens.


Carrington (or, if one prefers, Smarrington) events would seem more a statistical certainty than not. That is, the question is not "if" such a solar storm will ever happen again, but "when" will such a solar storm happen again -and how prepared, in practical terms, will communities be in the aftermath of such a solar storm?

Here in Alaska while I was living up north of the Arctic Circle I recall one year in particular when the aurora borealis was unusually active in the night skies. This was clearly visible to the eye in a big way. During that whole year it was often difficult or impossible to get telephone calls through to anywhere else, because of the same sunspot cycle peaking and solar flares which caused the auroral activity. A number of pieces of hardware needed to be replaced during that year too, with whole villages being out of touch except via shortwave radio while their satellite dish was out of service.

"Be Prepared," indeed. Thanks to an anti-gay religious group basically infiltrating and then subsequently taking over the adult leadership in my troop of the Boy Scouts, I myself did not make it past the rank of Life scout; had finished all requirements except for completing the service project but they made sure the gay boy would not become the first scout in that troop to attain Eagle rank in several years (...ironically, unknown to them, the previous scout who made Eagle was also a gay lad). So, not being an Eagle scout, I am not entirely sure what "Being Prepared" for a Smarrington event would look like in practical terms. Being an Eagle scout in that troop subsequent to my departure meant, more than anything else, that the lad was primed to be part of a certain church highly enthusiastic about members pumping out as many kids as possible. The Boys Scouts of America, in general, since that era have not impressed me as doing a particularly good job of educating youths about the ecological consequences of behaving like fecund cultists on Easter Island. "Be Prepared" -what, to procreate, and procreate, and then maybe procreate some more while pocketing federal tax money paid in from the taxes of everyone at the same time they kick out not only gay boys but also any straight boys who say the BSA's discriminatory policy is flawed? The Girls Scouts of America has far better sense and infinitely less hypocrisy than the BSA, imho.

The values of community which I think may be of genuine practical use in the event power goes off in Puna --whether because of a hurricane hit, a decline in fossil fuel availability, a 'Smarrington event, or whatever-- will best serve us to "be prepared" if folks are neighborly with one another. That is, prepared to assist themselves and those nearby in a practical manner -regardless of whether they are gay, straight, belong to a certain church or have a certain skin color. "Dealing with what happens" works better when bonds of community are present, unifying people across superficial differences for a greater good. By contrast, recent nightmare scenarios in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia demonstrate all too clearly the results of districts fracturing along sectarian and racial lines during times of resource stress instead of pulling together in mutual aid. It may be that any group which officially discriminates against and actively persecutes members of another group --as does the Boy Scouts of America-- is not assisting Puna so much to "be prepared" in pulling together as it is setting us up to fracture apart during a time of stress.

Interesting that a documented mechanism exists via which the power grid for most of North America could be wiped out in 90 seconds and that this mechanism (a big solar flare associated with the sunspot cycle) has been known for many decades. A better use of tax money than, say, subsidizing the BSA by congressional line item might be to attend to replacing the one aging satellite which monitors solar flares and putting in place a better system for grid shutdown in the event a big flare is detected.


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A pleasant slideshow: http://www.thejoymovie.com

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[PaulW]

Thanks, I'd never heard of the Carrington Event before.

Black mark against New Scientist for picking 2012 for its hypothetical re-occurrence.
According to NASA it's a twice-a-millennium event so the chance it'll happen in 2012
is tiny, and there are already enough badly-misinformed people thinking that the world
will end (yet again!) that year. The most popular question at NASA's Ask-an-Astrobiologist
is about an imaginary planet called Nibiru which is supposedly visible from the Southern
Hemishphere and about to crash into the Earth on 12/12/12. And then there's the Mayan calendar...

There are many more mundane ways in which we could lose power for a few days in Puna - hurricane,
lava, earthquake. Makes you glad to live in an area where so many houses have catchment water.