justlou’s Recent Comments

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  Good post Tom, and good discussion overall.  Tom's basic point -- our industrial mode of production is extremely unsustainable from the standpoint of finite inputs and open waste streams -- is entirely credible. 

  But, we limit our vision if we do not look at agriculture as part of our entire system of living on earth.  Simply, we suck at it.  If we can avoid the myopic economic worldview of technocratic cornucopians we should be alarmed and frightened by the outlook.   

  Any attempt to make agriculture sustainable must be accompanied by a vision that encompasses the entire gamet of production, processing, transportation, consumption and "waste".  Ratcheting up the technology to attempt the impossible mission of sustaining our way of living will only bury us under the mountain we think we need to ascend.  We are at the peak.  We have reached the limit but we have no vision of a lower and sustainable plateau. 

  Our rural and urban communities are both disaster zones.  People, in both rural and urban areas, suffer soulfully from a lack of intimate and direct contact with primary nature and our addiction with seductive technological substitutions that take us even further apart into alien landscapes.  We need a vision that transforms our lives by integrating producers with consumers and the production environment with an ecologically restored earth.  We could with appropriate and labor saving technologies smartly employ billions of people on this earth, respecting and reinforcing diversity of nature and culture and achieving health for the planet and people if we only have the right vision.  All of our worldviews need to be closely and truthfully examined for we are all tainted by living in this screwed up mental prison.  Outside the box may just not be out there enough.

  On An 'agri-intellectual' talks back posted 3 months ago 49 Responses

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  The midwest is just one big corn/soy factory.  Laws regulating spray drift across property lines are significantly and blatantly ignored by both aerial and ground applicators.   

  Last year about this same time I complained about an aerial applicator spraying fungicide on field corn growing on the edge of a central IL town.  At low elevations, the pilot was making his turns directly over tens of homes in the town.  For what?  Risking the lives of the town's inhabitants for a few more bushels of corn per acre?  This represents nothing but warped values of the farmer and the spray pilot as well as the regulating authorities who allow this practice to happen fairly often with little legal restriction.  Surprisingly, no one in the town registered any complaints.  The people have largely accepted the domineering ways of big ag.  I respect the organic grower in this article for standing his ground. 

   

   

   

   

   

  On With a gust of wind, an Iowa crop duster can squash an organic farm posted 4 months ago 18 Responses

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  Higher energy prices, regardless of the source, are inevitable with or without climate legislation.  But moderates like McCaskill are simply discounting all of the future negative costs associated with the dirty sources.  In this respect there is no difference between her position and those of the reactionary right legislators like John Shimkus.  This is a very sad, but very predictable development.  "Yes we can" is in the can.  Artificially maintaining "cheap" fossil energy is only pushing the "transition" to a later date, and raising the chance of a much harder reckoning with the inevitable bottleneck. 

  On McCaskill says House climate bill will sink in Senate posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago 21 Responses

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  Nugget:  I say you are pretty well in touch with the politics of the rural Midwest.  You have encapsulated much of what passes as the politically correct here.  Independence is overrated here as so many mindlessly parrot what they need to follow and conform with the dominant community ideologies.     

  On Seeking a tougher climate bill, green groups set eyes on the Senate posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago 19 Responses

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  Sensibility would tell us that, even in the absence of global warming caused by higher carbon dioxide emissions, we are headed toward a cliff in fossil fuel cost and ease of availability.  The future looks poorer if we do not exploit alternative energy sources.  Global depression as a result of continued over reliance on oil and coal will take us down before the most dire consequences of global warming reach us.  In a more likely scenario it will be a combination of both acting synergistically to bring our demise.  Either way, it is an emergency. 

  On Why we overestimate the costs of climate change legislation posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago 12 Responses