Subject: Re: Commercial & Industrial Hemp Symposium II an InternationalEvent (fwd)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 13:48:14 EST

Oh, dear, hemp and kenaf and bamboo and agricultural residues as biomass
---striking directly at the heart of sustainble issues and such. 

After too darned much research and too many years wandering through the bowels
of technologies, I have some questions and maybe something somewhat lucid to
enter into the records. I'll focus on pulp and papermaking as a metaphor for
all these substitution strategies.

1) Generally speaking, we are entering into a post resource phase of evolving
industrial societies. That means we are running out of resources at varying
rates witin resource categories, but still running out of them. In pulp and
papermaking, we are running out of woods, meaning, at first layers of
consideration, forest woods. 

2) Any process of mono-cropping at agricultural levels which uses machinery,
transportation economics, chemicals, land, soil and ever fewer people is, by
definition, unsustainable because resources of which we are running out are
involved--not the least of which are land and soil.

3) To substitute hemp, kenaf, bamboo, agricultural residues, et al, as biomass
within existing technologies (even the scaled down, more local versions) are,
necessarily, transitiional strategies since it is the technologies(and created
demand) which are the problem not the resources. Even agricultural residues,
which I like a lot as a concept, present significant problems. 

4) Pulp and papermaking facilities, as technologies and as metaphors, gigantic
and miniscule, are industrial and social monsters, terrible neighbors,
massive, overdifferentiated, magnificently polluting, horrendously expensive
and capital intensive, automata. As Leopold Kohr correctly identified, the
problem is size itself. Whenever anything gets too big, it becomes the problem
itself. Pulp and papermaking technologies long ago passed the problem per se
nexus.

5) To deal with our addictions to paper, packaging and such by substitution
strategies (hemp, kenaf, bamboo, agricultural residues, et al, for wood)
within existing technologies is a strategy doomed to fail. Methadone for
heroin. Thumbs for crack. Just say No!

6) We will deal with our addictions to consumption, if at all, by reinventing
minds and technologies which will function within the sets of conditional
variables presenting themselves in actuality. More likely, we will eat
ourselves out of house and home.

No screaming and yelling needed, kept scientists writing papers, flacks
beating the media into submission, just good old fashioned inventiveness,
bundles of money, political will, economic muscle, creative thinking and so on
will do. We've done it before and we can do it again (music up, please)

Few, it seems, wants to look these points straight in the eye, including and
especially those who claim to be doing so within the existing (or slightly
modified) mindsets whether nasty industrialists or lily-green do-gooders. 

Suggested reading: Orwell's short novel, Animal Farm. Takes less than 3 hours.

'Nuff said. Anybody who wants a serious, indepth, direct discussion about
these issues rather than wishful thinking or large scale BandAids may apply
for time and place--choice of weapons, and such. 

Let the fun begin!! or the sound system blink out.

Milo Clark
Strategic Design
Berkeley CA USA