That's Ecofantastic!!! Day 5...

This whole week I will be honoring ecofantastic items...

Ecofantastic: A product/method/ideology so absurdly priced/developed/formulated that its irrationality transcends any purposeful usage and/or implementation into the present-day green movement, to the point of almost becoming fantasy.

While my clan continues to recover from the glory that is 11 month-old food poisoning, hazmat suits be damned, let's continue with part 5 (actually part 4, but who's counting?) of the Ecofantastic series.

Ecofantastic: Agrciultural fuels are the wave of the future...

Agrofuels have many noble charachteristics but they are not, in fact, going to save the world. Many misconceptions range from the simple notion that agrofuels are clean and green, all the way to the exotic, lofty insinuation that agrofuels can make magic, spurring rural development and boosting economies. Many --if not all-- of the biofuel praises could not be farther from the truth.


This "solution," while founded on good-natured principles, might be (ok, it is) hurting the industry and the planet more than it's helping.

How big is the picture?

Industrialized countries are going biocrazy, but their current vision of the future might be bigger than their stomachs. They hope to provide 5.75% of Europe’s transport fuel by 2010, and 10% by 2020.

As foodfirst.org points out, those goals lead to some major problems:

These targets far exceed the agricultural capacities of the industrial North. Europe would need to plant 70% of its farmland to fuel. The U.S.’s entire corn and soy harvest would need to be processed as ethanol and bio-diesel. Northern countries expect the Global South to meet their fuel needs, and southern governments appear eager to oblige.

And oblige they do...


Currently, smaller nations like Indonesia and Malaysia are jumping on the biofuel bandwagon, rapidly cutting down forests to expand palm-oil plantations.

In Brazil, bio-fuel crops already occupy an area the size of Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Great Britain combined. They're also planning to increase sugar cane acreage 500%.

In Columbia, the government is "acquiring" land (see: stealing from indigenous people and minorities) in order to produce biofuels. Paramilitary forces insure that anyone caught resisting will be happily relocated to a more favorable locale below the crops.

And that's just a small glimpse at the "progress" in the other half of the world. Read the rest of the foodfirst article and get a much, much bigger picture of the whole story. It's wonderfully written.


Not surprisingly, chimp whisperer extraordinaire Jane Goodall is especially critical of the deforestation caused by bifouel farming. She's witnessing the production-effects firsthand:

We're cutting down forests now to grow sugarcane and palm oil for biofuels and our forests are being hacked into by so many interests that it makes them more and more important to save now.


Hardest hit? Hard to say.

Here's a small glimpse at Borneo.

The well-intentioned switch to biofuels in the West is destroying Borneo’s rain forests - one of the greenest places on Earth. Environmentalists claim that an area of forest the size of Wales was cleared last year as Indonesia cashes in on the new “green gold” and plants miles of palm oil trees to meet surging demand.

The UN says the entire rain forest will be gone in 15 years, and the native wild orangutan extinct in just 10...

Groups trying to highlight the destruction are being threatened by the developers...

Ninety new biodiesel factories are under construction here - the developers encouraged by far-away countries “going green”. [More]

Doesn't sound very promising, Earth-wise or otherwise. Another one bites the dust.


With all this data against biofuel (insluding the economic predictions), it's amazing to see that it still moving forward: Airplanes, Corporate Alliances, more Airplanes,

As that author noted, the biggest frustration with biofuel is its well-intended beginnings. What was supposed to be the wave of the future is now turning out to be a tsunami of destruction. And while we (now) might be quick to criticise the rush to action, you can't help but look at the ecofantastic trend market and wonder: What's the next biofuel occurring right now? What is its comprehensive effect on the environment? What's green simply for now, and what's green for now AND for later?

We are living and working under the auspicious roof of Web 2.0 - a name give to the intertube with an understanding that the old days of Gen-1 design and structure are over and done with. There are new ways to operate, analyze and function, so much so that the original model has been broken. So my question is this:

At what point do we begin to conserve/develop/implement/function in Green 2.0? Will we ever learn faster than destroy?

Camp out here and wait for some news...

Thechnodamus predicts our lack of future...

We are living in an age of auspicious reality, finally aware that our habits and actions can degrade and erode depending on the severity of our dependence. Changes are being made, action is being taken, and the world is seemingly optimistic.

But the world has evolved into a MacArthur's Maze of tubes, tunnels, generators, plants, dams, and pumps - all of which require a human hand or inputted computer to have dippy birds push their keys and pull their Wonka levers (smile Simpson's fans).

Recently, I read an interesting article from the October 2006 issue of New Scientist (yes, it takes me 10 months to get through a typical NS mag) that asked an important question: As such a dominant species, what would happen to the world - technological infrastructure and all - if every single one of the 6.5 billion people on this planet just disappeared, leaving all our worldly possessions/inventions/chemicals/buildings behind??? How quickly would nature reclaim the planet?

From the article:

If tomorrow dawns without humans, even from orbit the change will be evident almost immediately, as the blaze of artificial light that brightens the night begins to wink out. Indeed, there are few better ways to grasp just how utterly we dominate the surface of the Earth than to look at the distribution of artificial illumination (see Graphic). By some estimates, 85 per cent of the night sky above the European Union is light-polluted; in the US it is 62 per cent and in Japan 98.5 per cent. In some countries, including Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, there is no longer any night sky untainted by light pollution.

"Pretty quickly - 24, maybe 48 hours - you'd start to see blackouts because of the lack of fuel added to power stations," says Gordon Masterton, president of the UK's Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Renewable sources such as wind turbines and solar will keep a few automatic lights burning, but lack of maintenance of the distribution grid will scuttle these in weeks or months. The loss of electricity will also quickly silence water pumps, sewage treatment plants and all the other machinery of modern society.

Think the article is a good read? Buy the hardback version, made of 100% tree.

You might as well, cause it'll take back your planet someday.

Here's a review (via Reed Business Information):

If a virulent virus—or even the Rapture—depopulated Earth overnight, how long before all trace of humankind vanished? That's the provocative, and occasionally puckish, question posed by Weisman (An Echo in My Blood) in this imaginative hybrid of solid science reporting and morbid speculation. Days after our disappearance, pumps keeping Manhattan's subways dry would fail, tunnels would flood, soil under streets would sluice away and the foundations of towering skyscrapers built to last for centuries would start to crumble. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, anything made of bronze might survive in recognizable form for millions of years—along with one billion pounds of degraded but almost indestructible plastics manufactured since the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, land freed from mankind's environmentally poisonous footprint would quickly reconstitute itself, as in Chernobyl, where animal life has returned after 1986's deadly radiation leak, and in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a refuge since 1953 for the almost-extinct goral mountain goat and Amur leopard. From a patch of primeval forest in Poland to monumental underground villages in Turkey, Weisman's enthralling tour of the world of tomorrow explores what little will remain of ancient times while anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like.

But my favorite is the Washington Post critic:

Who cares?

Sheesh, Post, lighten up.

With the way Conservatives flock to creationism, you think you'd enjoy a little bit of science fiction.