For Our Childrens Earth rebuilding the soil sustaining the future
Earth is "the blue planet", in consequence of its large water body, which weakly absorbs light at the red end of the optical spectrum, so highlighting wavelengths at the blue end of the range. Viewed against the blackness of outer space, a very narrow blue band can be seen to encircle the globe, which represents the Earths atmosphere, and is so coloured because air molecules scatter blue light more strongly than they do red light.The word "earth" may also mean soil, which is the fragile living skin of the Earth. Without soil, and the overlying atmosphere, with its 20% oxygen content, life on the surface of the Earth could not exist. Certainly there would be no humans.
Soil consists of a mineral component, which is generally a mixture of sand, silt and clay. Since soils vary considerably in their composition, they may be compared universally using a "soil texture triangle" http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/SoilTexture_USDA.png. A good fertile soil is a loam, which has an approximate composition of 20% clay, and of the order of 40% each of silt and sand. These terms do not reflect the chemical composition of the three components, but their particle size. Thus, sand grains are of the order of millimeters or less in diameter, while clay particles are of nanometer dimension; particles of silt are of a size somewhere in between these orders. Soil also contains organic material, referred to as soil organic matter (SOM), or soil carbon (SC). This ranges from identifiable plant components, to their more indistinct decomposition products, created by passage through the bacterially replete bodies of earthworms, and by the actions of the other creatures, and microbes that live within soil http://ergobalance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/deep-down-and-dirty-science-of-soil.html. The mass of the living creatures themselves is also accounted in the reckoning of SOM.
Soil is indeed both fragile and living. It is fragile because it is prone to degradation, principally by erosion. It is living because it contains an amazing number of different species within it, collectively termed the soil food web http://www.sciencereviews2000.co.uk/blog_v2/view/science-progress-news/62/soil-erosion-climate-change-and-global-food-security-challenges-and-strategies/806#.VFDC3xbyVco. It is thought that a single teaspoonful of soil may contain a billion microbes. A major source of soil erosion is deforestation, which may occur naturally, e.g. through forest fires, or by human actions, to clear land to grow commercial crops on, e.g. soya beans in South America. Slash and burn methods are employed on a smaller scale by groups of farmers who are poor and need to feed their families. More exquisite methods are sometimes employed to clear ground of trees, shrubs and all else, e.g. the process of "chaining" where a ships anchor chain, maybe 400-600 feet in length, is strung between two 100 tonne tractors. If 2 inches in diameter, such a chain will have a weight of 7-10 tonnes http://www.sotra.net/products/tables/weight-for-studlink-anchor-chain, and so by driving the tractors, the chain is dragged along the ground, where it simply rips out anything in its path by the roots.
Soil that has been so denuded is vulnerable to erosion, all the more so when it is left uncovered as a result of monoculture cropping, and during the winter, when the erosive elements of wind and water are at their most forceful. While erosion is the major (85%) cause of soil degradation globally, other impacts are important, e.g. compaction, crusting (hardsetting), loss of nutrients, contamination, salinization and loss of biological life in the soil. Once the productivity of the land has been lost, the strategy is to move on and clear yet more forest. According the the United Nations, one third of the worlds cropland has been abandoned over the past 40 years due to degradation and desertification http://www.giz.de/expertise/downloads/giz2013-en-german-national-report-unccd.pdf, while 52% of the land used for agriculture is moderately to severely affected by soil degradation http://www.unccd.int/Lists/SiteDocumentLibrary/WDCD/DLDD%20Facts.pdf.44% of the worlds food production systems and 50% of its livestock are considered to be vulnerable to climate change, while 12 million hectares of crop land are lost per year (23 hectares per minute), where 20 million tonnes of grain might have been grown. All of this against an estimated requirement to produce 60% more food by 2050, not only to match a population that is predicted to increase from around 7 billion now, to 9.5 billion, but that there is a rising "middle class" who are likely to have greater expectations from their diet, i.e. want to eat more meat, which is far more land intensive to produce than growing crops to be eaten directly http://ergobalance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-soil-land-water-climate-honey-bees.html. Thus, we are destroying the productivity of that same land from which we demand a relentless increase in production: two powerful forces pulling in opposite directions, with an inevitable "give" at some point.
There is a close connection between soil and water. In the natural order of things, water evaporates from plants and wetlands (evapotranspiration), rivers and oceans, forming clouds in the atmosphere from which rain falls. The rain is absorbed through the soil surface (infiltration), and is taken up by movement through the soil (transmission): when the rates are high for both processes, the soil acts as an effective "sponge" and can absorb large amounts of water http://agroecologygroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Briefing-on-flooding-soil-and-farming-pr.pdf. When the soil becomes compressed, e.g. by heavy farm machinery or over-intensive grazing, a process called "compaction", the water cannot enter it so easily and tends to move elsewhere, as "runoff". Water runoff contributes to soil erosion: when the soil is unable to retain water, it runs off the surface taking large amounts of soil with it. This soil ends up downstream in rivers (silting-up) where it creates bottlenecks and causes the water to back up. Since it is in the surface layers of the soil that nutrients, e.g. phosphate, are concentrated, essential fertility is lost from the soil in the process. Soil may also be eroded to below the optimum rooting depth of plants, which stunts their growth. Production of maize has expanded in the U.K. since the 1970s http://anewnatureblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/lost-in-the-drainage-maize/, mostly grown to feed cattle. The stubble is left over autumn and winter, and is not ploughed into the ground, meaning that fine soil is exposed to be washed downstream, when the impacts of wind and rain are at their strongest. Regions in the South West of England, including the catchment that drains into the Somerset Levels http://ergobalance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/flooding-on-somerset-levels-and.html, have some of the greatest concentrations of maize crops in the country, and it has been estimated that some 50% of the sediment in the Tone and Culm rivers are from soil eroded from fields of maize grown to feed concentrated and highly producing dairy herds.
Uplands, if well manged, can absorb large quantities of water, and planting trees and shrubs has a hugely positive effect in reducing the volume of water that ends up downstream. Rather than intensive grazing, which can urge soil compaction, a loss of vegetation and increased soil erosion, less intensive and all year round grazing can help to improve the soil structure and its all over quality. The presence of soil organic matter (SOM) is a critical feature of good soil structure and its ability to retain nutrients. This improved soil structure also enhances the ability of soil to absorb and hold water, so that a high SOM content can make a dramatic effect in the capacity of soil to hold and transmit water, while the loss of SOM has a large and detrimental effect on the holding capacity of soil for water and its ease of becoming compacted. In simple terms, a good soil is like a springy sponge, and in its ability to hold water, not only is runoff retarded but the lower lying aquifers are able to recharge, so preserving supplies of freshwater, as well as mitigating surface flooding. As a point of note, however, in some locales that were inundated during the 2013/2014 winter, in the U.K., even after the surface flood-waters had been pumped away, flooding still remained a problem due to "groundwater pressure", where the raised water table pushes up through the ground, and up through the floors of houses that have only floorboards as their ground-level barriers, rather than solid concrete.
In a 1937 letter to U.S. State Governors, urging soil conservation laws, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote, "The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself." This was around the time of the dust bowls that arose in the northern United States and Canada, where former prairie lands had been turned over to farming. The impact of ploughing, loss of prairie grasses, and drought literally caused the soil to blow away. The resulting effects on the populations were dramatised by John Steinbeck in his "Grapes of Wrath", where some 2.5 million people were displaced as they made their way toward California, looking for work and for land on which they could grow food. Good soil has been described as "the real World Bank", meaning that it is the one thing, of all things, that we must invest in. Without soil we have nothing.
The main critical factor in mitigating soil erosion, is to keep it covered throughout the year. In Utah and Montana, it has been demonstrated that ground cover has a profound protective influence, and for uncovered ground some 17 tonnes of soil/hectare/year can be lost http://www.stopclearcuttingcalifornia.org/bca/research/Ecology%20of%20Soil%20Erosion.pdf (Figure 1). This amounts to an annual loss of soil depth of about 1 mm, and at this rate, about one inch of soil would be lost in 25 years. However, this decreases markedly with increasing ground cover, so that it is nearer 1 tonne/ha/year for 100% coverage. At around 0.1 mm/ha/yr (about the thickness of a human hair), this implies that it would take 250 years to lose that same inch of soil. Under natural conditions, soil is created at a similar rate to that at which it is eroded, and it takes 200-1,000 years to form an inch of soil, depending on climate. Thus, by covering the ground, the rate of erosion is brought back to the natural balance point, rather than it being lost at 10-40 times the natural rate, as it is on agricultural lands presently.
The following are some notes, taken from a talk that I give on the broad subject of soil and other resource depletion and what we might do to cope with it. The emphasis is on Permaculture and the Transition Towns movement, so to move from the global village to a village of globes, i.e. to more resilient, self-sufficient localised communities.
•“You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.” Albert Einstein.
•Seeing the whole picture, and placing design elements together to support one another.
•“The problem is the solution.”
•Companion planting; no-till, building soil structure, efficient use of water, smaller PNK inputs; capturing carbon; best use of light; exploit “3rddimension”.
•“Three sisters”: bean + corn + squash.
Forest Garden (Principle of “layers”). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening
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Future Ops Online Premium 1.1.30 APK Free Download Android App. Premium Supporters now have a few days of sneak peek access to brand new Work In Progress features as a thank you for your help.
COOP Survival MMO Mode is now available to everyone, however its under heavy reconstruction right now, many features had to be disabled in order to optimize them for mobile devices, including picking up weapons, buildings must be simplified.
Inst ructions :
Download App
Install APK
Premium Supporters will soon receive early access to PVP MMO Mode which is identical to COOP, except you can kill other players to have them drop their gun, and give you xp and virtual currency. This will be built during January.
A Multiplayer First Person Shooter with up to 44 Players in COOP Survival MMO, Team Deathmatch and Capture The Point game modes.
Air Vehicles allow you to play Mobile FPS games like never before, this game aims to be your mobile battlefield, for Free!
Please always update your game, if there are server side changes, then a new server version is created that is only accessible by the newest version of the game, which is why it looks like there are no servers online.
Whats in this version : (Updated : Aug 19, 2013)
Performance Updates
Bug Fixes
Required Android O/S : 2.2+
Screenshots :
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A Multiplayer First Person Shooter. 44 Player COOP, TDM and CTP with Vehicles!
Future Ops Online Premium Apk Downloadplay.google.com.FutureOpsOnlinePremium Premium Supporters now have a few days of sneak peek access to brand new Work In Progress features as a thank you for your help.
COOP Survival MMO Mode is now available to everyone, however its under heavy reconstruction right now, many features had to be disabled in order to optimize them for mobile devices, including picking up weapons, buildings must be simplified. Premium Supporters will soon receive early access to PVP MMO Mode which is identical to COOP, except you can kill other players to have them drop their gun, and give you xp and virtual currency. This will be built during January.
A Multiplayer First Person Shooter with up to 44 Players in COOP Survival MMO, Team Deathmatch and Capture The Point game modes.
Air Vehicles allow you to play Mobile FPS games like never before, this game aims to be your mobile battlefield, for Free!
Please always update your game, if there are server side changes, then a new server version is created that is only accessible by the newest version of the game, which is why it looks like there are no servers online.
Future Ops Online Premium 1.1.32 APK Free Download Android App. Premium Supporters now have a few days of sneak peek access to brand new Work In Progress features as a thank you for your help.
COOP Survival MMO Mode is now available to everyone, however its under heavy reconstruction right now, many features had to be disabled in order to optimize them for mobile devices, including picking up weapons, buildings must be simplified.
Instructions :
Download App
Install APK
Premium Supporters will soon receive early access to PVP MMO Mode which is identical to COOP, except you can kill other players to have them drop their gun, and give you xp and virtual currency. This will be built during January.
A Multiplayer First Person Shooter with up to 44 Players in COOP Survival MMO, Team Deathmatch and Capture The Point game modes.
Air Vehicles allow you to play Mobile FPS games like never before, this game aims to be your mobile battlefield, for Free!
Please always update your game, if there are server side changes, then a new server version is created that is only accessible by the newest version of the game, which is why it looks like there are no servers online.
Whats in this version : (Updated : Aug 19, 2013)
Added Mode Filters
More Bug Fixes
Map Builder: Added Multiple Camera Views
Added Nook fix and other fixes.
Performance Updates
Bug Fixes
Required Android O/S : 2.2+
Screenshots :
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I attended a fascinating event last night - a Cafe Scientifique meeting held in the town of Reading in South East England. Last month it was me in the bear-pit, talking about "What Happens When the Oil Runs Out?", which remains a pertinent question. Last night it was the turn of Dr Chris Warrick from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy based near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, which hosts both the MAST (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) and the better known JET (Joint European Torus) experiments. Fusion research costs an awful lot of money and we are still told actually getting energy from it is decades away. In the audience was a veteran engineer/physicist who had worked on the pioneering ZETA experiment in the late 1950s, from which neutrons were detected leading to what proved later to be false claims that fusion had occurred, their true source being different versions of the same instability processes that had beset earlier machines.
Nonetheless, his comment was salient: "In the late 50s, we were told that fusion power was 20 years away and now, 50-odd years later it is maybe 60 years away." Indeed, JET has yet to produce a positive ratio of output power/input energy, and instability of the plasma is still a problem. Dr Warrick explained that while much of the plasma physics is now sorted-out, minor aberrations in the magnetic field allow some of the plasma to leak out, and if it touches the far colder walls of the confinement chamber, it simply "dies". In JET it is fusion of nuclei of the two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium that is being undertaken, a process that requires a "temperature" of 100 million degrees.
I say "temperature" because the plasma is a rarified (very low pressure) gas, and hence the collisions between particles are not sufficiently rapid that the term means the same distribution of energy as occurs under conditions of thermal equilibrium. It is much the same as the temperatures that may be quoted for molecules in the atmospheric region known as the thermosphere which lies some 80 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. Here too, the atmosphere is highly rarified and thus derived temperatures refer to translational motion of molecules and are more usefully expressed as velocities. However put, at 100 million degrees centigrade, the nuclei of tritium and deuterium are moving fast enough (have enough energy) that they can overcome the mutual repulsion arising from their positive charges and come close enough that they are drawn together by attractive nuclear forces and fuse, releasing vast amounts of energy in the process.
JET is not a small device, at 18 metres high, but bigger machines will be necessary before the technology is likely to give out more energy than it consumes. Despite the considerable volume of the chamber it contains perhaps only one hundredth of a gram of gas, hence its very low pressure. There is another matter and that is how long the plasma and hence energy emission can be sustained. Presently it is fractions of a second but a serious "power station" would need to run for some hours. There is also the problem of getting useful energy from the plasma to convert into electricity even if the aforementioned and considerable problems can be overcome and a sustainable, large-scale plasma maintained.
The plan is to surround the chamber with a "blanket" of lithium with pipes running through it and some heat-exchanger fluid passing through them. The heated fluid would then pass on its heat to water and drive a steam-turbine, in the time-honoured fashion used for fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. Now my understanding is that this would not be lithium metal but some oxide material. The heat would be delivered in the form of very high energy neutrons that would be slowed-down as they encounter lithium nuclei on passing through the blanket. In principle this is a very neat trick, since absorption of a neutron by a lithium nucleus converts it to tritium, which could be fed back into the plasma as a fuel. Unlike deuterium, tritium does not exist is nature being radioactive with a half life of about 12 years. However produced either separately or in the blanket lithium is the ultimate fuel source, not tritium per se. Deuterium does exist in nature but only to the extent of one part in about two thousand of ordinary hydrogen (protium) and hence the energy costs of its separation are not inconsiderable.
Exposure to radiation of many potential materials necessary to make the reactor, blanket, and other components such as the heat-exchanger pipes would render them brittle, and so compromise their structural integrity. Providing a fairly intense magnetic field to confine the plasma (maybe 4 Teslas - similar to that in a hospital MRI scanner) needs power (dc not ac as switching the polarity of the field would cause the plasma to collapse) and large power-supply units containing a lot of metals including rare earths which are mined and processed using fossil fuels. The issue of rare earths is troublesome already, and whether enough of them can be recovered to meet existing planned wind and electric car projects is debatable let alone that additional pressure should be placed upon an already fragile resource to build a first generation of fusion power stations.
World supplies of lithium are also already stressed, and hence getting enough of it not only to make blankets for fusion reactors and tritium production but also for the millions-scale fleet of electric vehicles needed to divert our transportation energy demand away from oil is probably a bridge too far, unless we try getting it from seawater, which takes far more energy than mining lithium minerals.
To quote again the ZETA veteran, "I wonder if maybe man is not intended to have nuclear fusion," and all in all, other than from solar energy I wonder if he is right. At any rate, garnering real electrical power from fusion is so far distant as to have no impact on the more immediately pressing fossil fuels crisis, particularly for oil and natural gas. Fusion Power is a long-range "holy grail" and part of the illusion that humankind can continue in perpetuity to use energy on the scale that it presently does. Efficiency and conservation are the only real means to attenuate the impending crisis in energy and resources.
Time for another Lets Play with me and Gabriel, in this case, 1989s Future Wars, an early game by Delphine Software (of Another World and Flashback fame) that they probably hoped everyone would have forgotten about by now. Here is a quote from our commentary: "Why, thats the biggest another monkeys butt Ive ever seen". Why not try to guess what the context for that was, then watch the video and see how close you were?
So theres that. Also I thought Id mention something that Ive been banging on about at the end of Zero Punctuation for the last few weeks, and thats the planned Escapist Expo in September.
Yes, my colleagues are organising a game convention get-together fun times scenario type thing in the city of Durham, North Carolina, where the Escapist offices are based. Ive been there once before after I did the GameX convention a while back but itll be nice to see how massively its changed since then. Ill be attending along with Graham and Paul from LRR and MovieBob and several other of my Escapist chums, so this presents American readers an ideal opportunity to hang out, get copies of Mogworld signed or perhaps murder me while Ive been foolish enough to make my whereabouts publicly known for a brief period.
Its on the weekend of September 14-16, 2012, and heres the site again with more details. Make a note, assassins.
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