I like how he freely admits his generation screwed up this world. It is also interesting that so many different people looking for solutions appear to be converging on the same things. I've seen this guy before, but I don't remember him mentioning permaculture.
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"Government's low interest rate policy is the official imprimatur that validates the low future time orientation of the populace."
From Dennis Mangan. Artificially low interest rates warp the whole structure of production and the effects radiate out into the culture. It's incredible to me that interest rates are that fundamental, but I think it's correct.
The Mises Institute has their MisesU lectures every year or so. They usually have one that hits on how bad these false interest rates are for business decision making.
I haven't thought of in relation to, for instance, a young woman getting tattoos and having a child out of wedlock. A strong background signal of abundance might encourage one to believe one's personal actions don't have much bearing on future outcomes. And the low interest rates would tend to persist over time, once the politicians got hooked on growth, so each generation would counsel the next to be a little less prudent and a little more daring, until high risk behavior is actually taught as the smart approach.
I want to look at this film in some detail later. I watched about the first 25".
One area he kind of glosses over is solid waste/sewage disposal. There are ways to handle this--I'm not an expert--but he should be able to construct a decent septic system. But to get there he needs a power supply and earth-moving equipment to install pipes. That would help kick-start his recessed greenhouse as well. Water tower and water treatment would be a good fundamental first step as well.
Potable water and waste disposal are extremely important. They seem to require a good bit of scale. Not insurmountable but it is a problem, and this fellow's community seems a bit atomized. I wish him the very best.
Humanure handbook is usually the way these folks go. A bucket and a lot of sawdust for feces; urine is generally regarded as fertilizer. So the bucket of feces and sawdust gets sequestered somewhere for two years- by then it is safe to use like compost.
Urine isn't normally a vector for human disease. It comes out of the body sterile, but is quickly colonized by soil bacteria, which converts the nitrogen in it into a form the plants can use.
At larger scales they sometimes put in reed beds, which can handle higher volumes of nitrogen than other plants. I think the reeds are then used as a green fertilizer on other crops. They'll also run sewage through gasifiers to get methane.
I once read an article in backwoodshome about burning cow dung. Apparently this creates ash that is a high quality fertilizer- and you don't need to wait two years to use it. But except for that article I haven't seen anything else on it. I think it may be a useful strategy as part of a energy/waste management system in a larger settlement.
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