"amid heavy rains, a dam broke atop one of two gypsum stacks at the Mulberry Phosphates plant on State Road 60, unleashing a 56-million gallon spill of the acidic wastewater into the Alafia River. The pollution killed everything in its path for 42 miles, eventually rolling into Hillsborough Bay. The death toll included more than 1 million baitfish and shellfish and 72,900 gamefish near the river’s mouth, 377 acres of damaged trees and other vegetation along the riverbank, and an unknown number of alligators. When state officials hit the company with a multimillion-dollar fine for the damage done, it declared bankruptcy and shut down."
Recently, during a rainstorm, a pesticide leaked from containers in a parking lot into the creek, killing all the amphibians in the creek for miles. And life goes on, just a little less nice than it used to be. i.e. its not just the big disasters that matter, but the countless little ones too.
> When state officials hit the company with a multimillion-dollar fine for the damage done, it declared bankruptcy and shut down.
This makes me furious. The employees and directors all go about their lives elsewhere with nary a scratch despite causing such a disaster. This is the problem with capitalism. Privatize profits, socialize losses. The only solution is to force companies to put up bonds or insurance sufficient to ensure this kind of devastation is properly paid for by private parties.
I feel compelled, from the tone of the comment, to point this out:
Limited liability isn't some surprise side effect of a corporation's legal structure, it is often right there in the name (Ltd, LLC, Pty Ltd, etc).
Yes that structure lets people get away with harmful shenanigans. The system is biased towards optimism. Feature, not bug. The benefits and strengths of this have so far completely outweighed the costs to the point where the argument against limited liability no longer has a leg to stand on.
The bonds and insurance idea is a much better way to play the situation.
Limited Liability refers to the suppliers of capital, which often differ from the employees and directors that are responsible for the issues like in the article. I am fine with this since there is no moral hazard, but the parties involved / responsible should not be able to take their bonuses, click bankrupt and restart elsewhere under a new name. Society needs more protection, clearly.
This is an accurate description of limited liability. It does not blanketly shield corporations from liability, only shareholders (and there are exceptions to this as well).
In fact, in Florida--as well as many other jurisdictions in the US--there is a special category of torts that cover liability for ultrahazarous activities and apply strict liability. There are cases that have specifically dealt with the impoundment of large quantities of water.
Bunyak v. Clyde J. Yancey & Sons Dairy, Inc., 438 So.2d 891 (Fla. App. 2 Dist. 1983).
Cities Service Co. v. State, 312 So.2d 799 (Fla. App. 2 Dist. 1975).[1]
Note the facts the latter case, Cities, dealt with:
>The appellant, Cities Service Company (Cities Service), operates a phosphate rock mine in Polk County. On December 3, 1971, a dam break occurred in one of Cities Service's settling ponds. As a result, approximately one billion gallons of phosphate slimes contained therein escaped into Whidden Creek and thence into the Peace River, thereby killing countless numbers of fish and inflicting other damage.
>Appellee, The State of Florida (State), filed suit against Cities Service seeking injunctive relief as well as compensatory and punitive damages arising out of the dam break.
It is absolutely true that the way that corporations have escaped liability for these activities is to "socialize losses" as an OP has aptly stated. In this situation, the prior owner went bankrupt and handed this major liablity to the state to maintain for years and when it breaks, the state (possibly federal) taxpayers and the environment will bear the loss.
The insurance company paid out the fines; they went bankrupt because they couldn't possibly continue to operate without massive hikes to their insurance (if they even could get more).
If they move on and start something again that is potentially dangerous, it is on the new insurance company to do some diligence in rating the risk of bad behavior.
> When state officials hit the company with a multimillion-dollar fine for the damage done, it declared bankruptcy and shut down.
That isn't employees and directors being shielded from a criminal charge. That is shareholders being shielded from costs beyond what they risked in the company. Nobody accused the employees or directors of doing anything wrong.
If the directors or employees had broken the law, they should have been prosecuted directly. The fact they weren't is evidence that people with access to the details didn't think they've done anything illegal. The state of environmental law isn't related to matters of profit and loss, or capitalism for that matter.
With Limited Liability, your private assets as an agent are shielded, but only if you don't pierce the veil. Criminal acts pierce the veil, and the government is usually pretty happy to scoop up money when possible.
I suspect there's more to the story than just "oopsie, private company did evil thing and got rich but nobody was held responsible". More likely is that they did what they were supposed to do at least to the black letter of the law, but failed otherwise. The directors, managers, etc likely didn't break any laws.
>The benefits and strengths of this have so far completely outweighed the costs to the point where the argument against limited liability no longer has a leg to stand on.
What data points did you include in your calculation which led you to that conclusion?
I think it is too early to measure the long term effects, saying the benefits completely outweigh the costs. For the investors, you are absolutely right. For the land and ecology 100 years from now, not so much. Stealing the health of tomorrow for gains today.
> The only solution is to force companies to put up bonds or insurance sufficient to ensure this kind of devastation is properly paid for by private parties.
Agreed, but in this case, it apparently was paid for by insurance. The next sentence in the paragraph antattack quoted is: "(Its insurance company wound up footing the bill.)"
It's still horrible from an environmental perspective, but at least Florida taxpayers didn't pay the cleanup bill.
No after-the-fact mechanism works against risks that take decades to materialise. Responsibility always dilutes faster than environmental toxins. Evidence is lost. Most senior decision-makers have died. Shareholders changed ten times over, etc...
That, plus misplaced optimism and time discounting combine to render even the strongest signal (i. e. the death penalty) blunt as to actually changing behaviour.
These disasters need to be stopped in the planning & licencing phase. For that, you'd need a state government that actually cares, and an EPA that isn't completely gutted every four to eight years.
The fines were described as being in the millions, what do you think the cost of this evacuation alone is? Hell, just the cost of the one employee constantly checking the levels for ~20 years is around a million. I don't have the exact data, but I have reasons for my guess.
Besides, you're criticizing me for the same thing you did by saying the insurance paid for the cleanup rather than the fine.
Yes, I guessed that twenty years of salary for a specialized public worker is around a million dollars. No real variation in their salary would make my point incorrect.
Why are you trying to make my "guesses" into a big deal rather than admit you misspoke about what the insurance company paid? Do you think that whatever fine they were levied predicted this necessary evacuation 20 years later?
Yeah, I think people conflate 'capitalism' and 'insufficient regulation'. Capitalism is a framework that requires regulation, even more so than communism or socialism, since the regulations are what defines how the markets work.
I think “insufficient regulation” is an almost necessary byproduct of capitalism. The search for profits leads to regulatory capture in every capitalist society I am aware of. I think this is because it is easier and cheaper to do things like lobby and have a revolving door with regulators and private industry than it is to actually compete with others. Competition is hard.
It's a necessary byproduct of any system run by people, which is why relying on a framework where able is preferable. That's why the US legal system relies so heavily on precedence: creating and agreeing on new law, and reconciling it with existing law, is cumbersome and slow, so make sure no one already did the work.
The benefit of both of those things is consistency.
Completely independent problem from capitalism, and it gets worse the more involved the government is in economic activity.
X is enabled by Y does not preclude X being enabled by Z. That's only when its an if and only if, but that isn't the case here. Capitalism and Soviet Communism are neither the only alternative social structures, nor some kind of logical negations of each other.
>If it’s enabled by capitalism, how do we explain Chernobyl
I don't know why I'm being treated like this for posting an obvious truth. Both capitalism and communism have both been root causes for environmental disasters. The question posed is not some clever rebuttal to blaming capitalism, but a simple mistake of reasoning. I guess I'm sorry to have been the one to point it out.
The owners of Chernobyl (the government) didn't declare bankruptcy and piss off, they spent massive moneys containing the problem. So, socialize profits, socialize losses.
Trying to stop catastrophes from happening needs regulation and incentives, both of these things are broken in capitalism by its nature. But its not impossible to have regulation and incentives in either capitalist or socialist projects.
"Socialized losses", as far as I understand it, means that the group paying for the losses is the same one as the one which is/was the beneficiary. Does someone think that EU citizens were set to benefit from the Chernobyl plant?
The saying is usually more like "privatize the profits, socialize the loses", which is derived from "socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor".
The point of the phrase is that the people who are paying for the costs (tax payers) are not the ones who received any benefit or were going to benefit (profits, shareholders, CEOs, etc.).
I always found the tribalistic "crony capitalism" vs "crony socialism" debate to be a convenient escape from actually discussing the removal of cronyism.
This seems like mostly schadenfreude. What does it matter to you if they pay or we all do, assuming that we have more than enough as a society to pay for it, i.e. the benefits of capitalism outweigh the losses.
The only impact is potential moral hazard, but that could be prevented with loss of licenses, etc.
> What does it matter to you if they pay or we all do
Because when you know you'll be held personally responsible, you'll act accordingly. If you feel like you can act any way you want without repercussion, then you'll automatically take more risks. Usually this is the way we justify the salaries of CEOs as well, "they are the ultimate responsible for everything in the company, so high salary is needed for that big risk".
Repeating what you've already written (or outright copying it verbatim / quoting yourself) is hardly a effective strategy of making yourself better understood via the internet. You'll do better by expanding or simplifying your point of view instead.
It seemed like you missed the part where I pointed out that there are other ways than monetary to prevent undesirable behavior. These people can be jailed or lose the ability to work in this industry. The situation is not an indictment of capitalism, it's an example of a poorly handled situation.
Being jailed or loosing the ability to work in a industry isn't necessarily better for everyone involved, if the person is actually normally good at what they do.
A monetary fee for causing a disaster feels extra well in place for positions that people generally take for their monetary compensation as well (board, director, presidents, C* and so on).
Individual accountability for corporate misdeeds might act as a deterrent to future misdeeds. Sarbaines-Oxley has some of this in it, if memory serves.
It matters because of the incentives and penalties that lead to capitalist companies making bad decisions.
If someone runs a mine where a leak could cost society $1B, but they personally make $1M off the outputs, that's a huge net negative for society and a huge net positive for the mine owner. The government has lots of money but their capacity to absorb consequences is not infinite. If the actors in question were personally liable, had accurate estimates of risk and loss, and knew they would be personally liable, they would probablt make better decisions. As it is today, they know they can make lots of money and the risk assessment doesn't matter because they can just walk away.
It matters to me because I want people to want to do things that are good for society and also good for them, rather than bad for society and good for them.
We either need to do something like that or find a way to reintroduce morality to amoral, purely fiscally motivated corporations... fixing incentive structures so their fiscal motivations cause them to make better choices seems far easier to me.
I think the word “potential” is optimistic. It 100% leads to moral hazard. We’ve seen this time and again in a variety of industries. If the parties involved - the actual people and not the corporations that are easily bankrupted and replaced with new corporations with the same people - are not held fully responsible then it will just keep happening.
Imagine if a guy stole your $500 TV, did $500 worth of damage to your window to get it, then sold it for $100. After he was caught, instead of going to jail his insurance was ordered to pay you $200.
Sounds like a case of "it's too expensive to deal with this wastewater, so let's just put it in a big pond and hope the dam bursts and we can claim it was all a big accident"
Mining industries are especially famous for this - there are ponds of waste that are 70 years old, just waiting for their moment to escape...
There's not much that can be done with it because essentially (not basically) it is acid. Phosphate mining uses sulfuric acid to extract the phosphates. These are large scale operations and produce a lot of water with a pH of 1.5-2. There's no comparable industrial process that can consume it as input. So it sits.
The gypsum stacks are the other waste byproduct. But it's less problematic because it doesn't flow, it just sits. The low level radiation prevents it's incorporation into commodity products such as gypsum wall board.
The byproducts get conflated because for convenience the radioactive gypsum waste from phosphate mining is used to contain the acidic sludge from phosphate mining. But it's the acidic sludge that is the fast acting ecological disaster. The gypsum will give you cancer of course, but as Joe Jackson sings everything gives you cancer. [1]
> There's not much that can be done with it because essentially (not basically) it is acid
Couldn't you neutralize it by (say) dumping in a bunch of baking soda? Or lye? (Hm, what actually happens if you mix sulfuric acid with lye? Do they neutralize each other, or turn into something even nastier than the sum of its parts? That'll teach me to blow off high school chemistry.)
There's far to much phosphate sludge for me to tackle. I don't have access to that much lye.
Anyway, far brighter minds than mine have been looking at for at least fifty years...Florida got serious about phosphate ecology and water quality in the 1970's. The gypsum stacks and sludge ponds exist because of water quality regulations not the good will of industry.
> what actually happens if you mix sulfuric acid with lye
This reaction produces sodium sulfate (a salt) plus water and heat [1]. No idea if this is practical, though. Maybe it’s difficult to source sufficient quantities of some base to neutralize the acid.
There are alkaline wastes. Steelwork slag, power plant fly ash, residues from concrete production, and, the big one, what's left of bauxite after making aluminum. It's probably possible to build a plant to combine them and get some neutral-pH solid out. Still have a heavy metal problem, though.
Florida does not have steel production because it is distant from both coal and iron ore. Same for Aluminum.
It does have portland cement production due to the abundance of limestone near the surface. However, portland cement production is more or less local globally...or it's usually made relatively close to where used. Conversely Florida's phosphate industry is a major source globally. The scales are incomensurate.
Yes. That’s exactly what it is used for. I don’t recall the exact amounts, but the Tampa Bay area produces a sizable share of all phosphate in the world.
Coal operations have slurry ponds where they store the sludge from washing the coal. And coal power plants have fly ash ponds which are bad for the environment. We’re shutting down the coal plants but these ponds will be around forever.
“ Although coal impoundments have a relatively low rate of failure, their extreme size—some hold more than a billion gallons of sludge—makes any breach potentially devastating.”
I am curious what you could do with all this. I was under the impression that ash could be composted pretty well. It is organic material after all. Or is the issue the other added chemicals?
Ash from wood may be compost-able, but I think the leftovers from burning coal can contain arsenic, mercury and lead among other things. There are also instances of the fly ash being radioactive. u/leetrout hints that they are from WV/EKY area, where hilly terrain can make stashing fly ash in slurry ponds less visible (but more susceptible to contaminating small streams undetected). Specifically in the eastern KY/OH regions, there massive impoundments <500 yards from navigable rivers (since barges transport to plants and water used in generation), so if they break, the sludge won't have far to travel to contaminate major waterways.
Power plant and incinerator fly ash contains heavy metals and other poisonous substances so needs to be separated to prevent environment contamination.
But I guess you could turn it into bricks and isolate those instead or even use them as building materials in some form of infrastructure.
I work there sometimes. They have a lady that rides around in a golf cart, taking water samples and testing, fulltime. I suppose thats their "aggressive monitoring".
Nevada is currently considering a "Bad Actors in Mining" bill to ban individuals from future business opportunities if they walk away without proper cleanup.
Let's say a company spends 50 years building up acid ponds or radioactive tailings or what have you. Then new management comes on board and is appalled and tries to start cleaning things up, but realizes they are falling farther behind, so they divert more and more resources to cleaning up. And it drives the company into the ground because the cleanup now costs more money than the company's revenues.
We punish the current management if they close down to prevent making things worse? We let the millionaires from the last 50 years ride off into the sunset and pin it on the last one out the door?
This is not a failing of capitalism. It is a failing of regulation. It is the regulation that discourages management from shutting down the harmful action. To escape punishment, they find another job somewhere else and leave the next victim holding the bag.
Because of the regulation, not even environmental activists are willing to take over because the axe falls on them.
So the idea is appealing, and is as good as any opening of the conversation. But then we see the complications and have to be a little sharper in the iteration of the regulation conversation. And the next iteration has some problems, too.
Pretty soon, people complain that we've made it so expensive to close a mine that nobody can afford to open one. And perhaps that's just the truth. Or perhaps we can be clever enough to force the costs lower than the benefits without compromising the future.
If we manage that, it will still probably make mining much much less appealing to the robber barons of today. It might make mining or industry or what have you so much less lucrative that the big money players might as well open a hot dog stand for the same margins.
"The water meets water quality standards for marine waters with the exception of pH, total phosphorus, total nitrogen and total ammonia nitrogen,"
"Marine water" itself will kill with three or four easy gulps, but I guess this wastewater is going into the ocean? It still sounds a bit too much like "yellow, except for the color, which is blue". Plus I'd expect any industrial wastewater to have lots of fun contaminants they haven't tested for and/or just don't have explicit limits set.
"A very aggressive monitoring operation"
There's a term I've been missing my whole life. It's my go-to action item priority one from now on when faced with...
"... everything possible to prevent a true catastrophe."
The stack in danger of breaching was filled 8 years ago with sea water from dredging the port, and it is supporting wild life now, for what that's worth. In my experience, flora and fauna will grow under nearly any conditions, though.
Phosphate industry waste water has a pH of 1.5-2. The ponds are sterile and a lovely azure despite what Google Maps shows. Nothing grows on their banks naturally, though with substantial remediation over a couple of decades, it's possible to surround the pond with a ring of pines and grass...this is the Florida phosphate industry's "land and lakes" program.
From time to time Florida developers have built housing developments on "land and lakes" tracts. It usually ends badly because the ground is unstable (still settling after all being mined), though post-tensioned prestressed concrete slab foundations can be used to reduce cracking (but not eventually uneven floors).
In my experience with phosphate industry sludge ponds, nothing much grows. I just looked at aerials from a tract southeast of Bartow that was under consideration for development in 1997. It had been out of service for almost twenty years back then. The ponds are no longer obviously toxic, but there is still does not appear to be normal Florida native vegetation along any of the shorelines.
Not surprising given how acidic phosphate sludge water is.
The fact that sea water can be stored in the leaking stacks over in Manatee county speaks to how sterile they are. The salinity of seawater is deadly to typical terrestrial plants.
>At a press conference Sunday morning, DeSantis said officials are pumping out 33 million gallons of water a day from the pond, and that the water "is not radioactive," although another official added that the water is "not water we want to see leaving the site."
Maybe the title needs to be changed.
Edit:
>Phosphogypsum is the "radioactive waste" left over from processing phosphate ore into a state that can be used for fertilizer, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.
Phosphate ores contain uranium. The gypsum picks up the decay product radium, which is an alkaline earth element like calcium. Radium emits gamma rays and alpha particles, and also produces radon.
Covered in TFA, not radioactive enough to be radioactive in anything other than a technical sense. It's still nasty though because it's basically the leftover concentrate from an industrial process.
Something radioactive enough to significantly increase your chances to have cancer in your lifetime can have no indication at all at the time of exposure. It's one reason it's important to be so careful about radioactive waste and it's disposal.
Eating a banana is slightly more radiation than living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant (and 1/3 the amount from living within 50 miles of a coal plant).
It's very mildly radioactive due to trace amounts of naturally occurring uranium and thorium (and the daughter isotopes they decay into). Those elements are present because they're in seawater, and the deposits it came from ultimately came from seawater drying. The "phosphogypsum is radioactive waste" claim is hype.
In the past, people used their own manure and that of animals to fertilize fields. Manure contains lots of phosphorus as animals actually absorb only a small percentage from nutrition.
Urbanization broke this cycle. Sewer systems got established and the phosphorus doesn't end up on the fields anymore. It eventually reaches the rivers and seas and passes into the sediment. What a waste (pun intended). Instead, people started to mine graveyards (for bones) and guano on remote pacific islands...
Edit: Urine might work even better because reprocessing it is way simpler than dealing with manure. The nitrate and sodium levels have to be adjusted. Also, excreted pharmaceuticals have to be neutralized. Meanwhile, with manure one has to deal with pathogens, eggs of parasitic worms and a host of other ingredients, which might be difficult to predict in urban settings.
Phosphate is the most limiting long term global mineral resource. Eventually we're going to have to mine it from average rocks (at 0.1% concentration). There is no substitute if you want agriculture.
Almost every crop. The problem is also that those phosphorous fertilizer are horribly inefficient , plants dont absorb much and most of it gets leached. So out of this 1 ton not a lot gets absorbed by the plants.
To this, we need to add the fact that phosphorous reserves are limited, some estimate that we will reach the peak P in 2030.
Maybe then we will be forced to think about more sustainable approaches?
There is only one way to fix this problem folks. Privatize the EPA, deregulate wastewater storage, and use the money saved to give the rich a tax cut. The rich will then trickle down into the reservoirs to save us from these problems.
Additionally, remove taxes on phosphate and fertilizer sales. Then raise taxes on state education to balance the offset. People will just learn to be happy and blissful.
Take it a step further and subsidize these phosphate pools. Pay for the subsidy by selling state bonds. Expect either the next generation of kids to pay all the bond principal and interest or cut state benefits for retired seniors. It will fix itself because Florida’s kids and retirees are more generous than Florida’s old phosphate miners. The kids and seniors will have a higher propensity to solve yesterday’s problems because they’re expected to save a higher percentage of their income compared to previous generations.
Just imagine the similar situations and much worse elsewhere in the world. Mining rare elements and poisoning native lands. Industrial titans have done an amazing job at shifting environmental focus from pollution to an invisible, harmless gas.
Genetically engineering crops so we can spray them with pesticides, I wonder where the wastewater from manufacturing those pesticides goes. Probably into the Mississippi river.
Industrial Agricultural is a biohazard. We need to embrace the methods we used to feed ourselves for millions of years, with nature instead of in opposition of nature.
Use of fire at all emerged about 1.5 million years ago. Homo Sapiens emerged about 300 thousand years ago. First signd of any sort of agriculture are from about 15 thousand years ago. Stone age ended and we got first bronze tools less than 10 thousand years ago.
The only method we have had "for millions of years" is hunter-gathering with stone tools.
Not only this but ancient agriculture supported fewer humans with a lot more work. This romanticized idea of growing food the old fashioned way and forget today’s busy way of life omits the part of doing nothing but growing food from not figuratively dawn to dusk. I spent some time in my youth farming the old fashioned way: hand tools only, carrying water from somewhere else, removing pests and weeds by hand. It is a terribly labor intensive process that managed to supplement my family’s food needs but not eliminate the need for purchased food by any means. We managed to do literally nothing else. We certainly couldn’t have fed anyone else since we didn’t have any kind of excess.
I don’t like industrial food. It is killing the planet abs pretty quickly. But it’s not doing it because farmers are evil. It’s because it the cheapest way to produce food. If we as a society want to go to a place where food costs 10-100x as much while availability goes down by about the same amount, let’s figure out how we will prevent mass starvation and population decline. But if the GP expects that farmers will switch to compost abs hand tools, they should probably expect to pay a lot more for a lot less food.
I’d argue that the average western person’s food budget comes from:
1) desire to eat « fresh » foods out-of-season (greenhouses, air transport, lengthy controlled-atmosphere storage)
2) feeding food to food and getting 1/10th back (feeding corn to a cow)
3) desire for labour-intensive foods. Potatoes can be straightforward harvested from a field by a machine. Alfalfa (or anything in a greenhouse) cannot.
I think the biggest barrier to going back to « the old way » is not having manufactured fertilizer. Nobody cares if the water came by pump instead of by hand. But I supposed over-watered at the end = more water in the product instead of useful matter.
Why stop there? Nutritional algae genetically engineered to balance macro and micro nutrients with any artificial flavor and texture surely is cheaper. Grow it in a jar at home.
I wonder how much improved robotics will change the picture. Labor intensive practices and crops might become more feasible if we can get robots to do that labor. Afaik agriculture is already moving in that direction with very fancy advanced tractors etc (I don't actually know anything about ag).
One issue that I foresee is that if something needs a very specialized robot, then the market might not be big enough to warrant the development cost. Undoubtedly it makes lot of sense to automate something like wheat or whatnot bulk crop because there is just tons of that around. But asparagus or something might be too niche?
As with many labour-intensive crops, people want to eat it, but not do the work involved themselves.
Ah, yes. The best asparagus is hand-picked the day of consumption, and it would be ideal if picked by the people eating it. I grew up in an area that used to have asparagus fields, so asparagus grew "wild" along the fences and ditchbanks. I would occasionally help my parents cut the day's wild asparagus for dinner. I hated it as a kid, but really grew to appreciate how good fresh asparagus is when compared to what has to be mass produced and shipped, because, as you say, nobody wants to do the labor.
I live in a rural area with farming and fishing as main industries. Many of the farms are family owned due to the limited land area here (island). Farmers want to grow food for people many have done it for generations. The rural area and nature is what they love. They want to grow food in a way that's as healthy as possible they don't want to deal with agricultural herbicides and pesticides.
But many people are in denial about how much work is needed to grow the food that feeds everyone. Crop yields need to be high and costs low at the grocery store end but farmers often only get around 200 dollars per ton for their hard effort.
Working with nature means using natural systems to produce food with less human energy and fossil fuels, and chemicals, and cutting down forests.
A quick quote from the referenced work:
"""
The pragmatic and practical approach to the main body of this work largely omits reference to those visions or beliefs classifiable as spiritual or mystical; not because these are not a normal part of human experience, but because they are arrived at as a result of long contemplation or intense involvement with the mysteries that eternally surround us.
We may “dream" understanding, but it is something we cannot demand, define, or teach to others; it is for each of us to develop.
There are things that nobody else can help us with, but in a book written to help people make real-life decisions, to build new landscapes, to regenerate damaged forests, and to lighten our load on earth, the present need is for clear and practical approaches.
In the preceding chapters, well-tried and common- sense techniques and strategies of earth restoration have been described and figured.
All of this comes to naught if we, as a people, continue to invest in arms and destruction, to permit land abuse, and to fail to tackle the social and political impediments to reclaiming desertified and abused lands, or even to prevent the poisoning of land. Thus, the following sections give strategies for change in the social and economic areas of society.
These strategies may, in fact, be of more assistance to real change than the skills of land management, for society has far more competent farmers and engineers than it has ethical ...
"""
Not that this is a sure-fire explanation, but off the top of my head I can think of at least 2 industries that would have vested interests in suppressing permaculture: pesticides & fertilizers. Annecdotally, many farmers here in France are straight up taught their trade by instructional material made by fertilizer, pesticide, and seed/grain manufacturers. So they might not even be aware of potential "better" options.
An imperfect analogy is that legalizing cannabis requires less labor & more funds than keeping it illegal, yet we're still hesitating to do that in many countries.
Humans (and thus most markets) have other incentives than simply having things for cheaper.
A first good step would be to add the external cost of fertilizers to the price. We are all paying for the destruction of oceans, the result of using fossil fuels in the production chain, and the by-product which get stored in large pools like this, and yet they can easily out compete more ecological minded production since the cost get applied to society at large rather than the industrial farm that bought the fertilizer.
Millions of years? Agriculture is less than 120,000 years old by most accounts. Are you suggesting the bulk of humanity returns to hunting and gathering? Even then accounts of early human history have us emerging less than a million years ago. I think permaculture practices have their benefits but that kind of hyperbole doesn't help the cause.
TL;DR: eating 1 kg of phosphogypsum each day yields 36 mSv/year. Conclusion: very very far from life-threatening ; nobody is going to die or get cancer because of this.
Oh God. This is Fukushima radioactive waters all again. I'm pissed: global warming is serious, and nuclear is our best bet. We dont need this fear-mongering non sense.
This gives: 26 pCi/g radium * 3.7 * 10**10 Bq/Ci * 10**-7 Sv/Bq (radium) = 0.100 mSv per Kg of phosphogypsum
So, if someone eats 1 kg of phosphogypsum per day, that would be 0.100 * 365 = 36 mSv/year.
Background dose is 5-10 mSv/year, a plane pilot or X-Ray machine operator gets around 25-50 mSv/year, an astronaut something like 500 mSv/year.
So, eating 365 kg per year will yield a higher than background dose, but nothing dangerous. I mean, it's probably dangerous to eat so much of this chemical stuff, but not because of radioactivity.
Sources:
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20150219224641/http://www1.fipr.state.fl.us/PhosphatePrimer/0/684AE64864D115FE85256F88007AC781
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20121026093251/https://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/docs/federal/520-1-88-020.pdf - Page 156 and following ; p175 for Radium
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphogypsum
This coming at the heels of Matt Gaetz suggesting that Miami with in abundant clean resources can become a crypto mining Mecca. What endless flow of energy you ask? Nuclear... (can’t find the link all that comes up is the sex trafficking charge)
There are NUMEROUS places in the US that have similar or larger NATURAL concentrations of these. Pick any places in the Western US from So Cal to NV to UT to NM back to AZ!!
Naturally NO WHERE in the article or any other references do they give actual numbers (e.g. Sv/hour) for the radioactivity. That actually matters a metric shxt-ton for assessing the actual risk. Without that it's nothing more than a boogie that appears after yelling "radiation".
"amid heavy rains, a dam broke atop one of two gypsum stacks at the Mulberry Phosphates plant on State Road 60, unleashing a 56-million gallon spill of the acidic wastewater into the Alafia River. The pollution killed everything in its path for 42 miles, eventually rolling into Hillsborough Bay. The death toll included more than 1 million baitfish and shellfish and 72,900 gamefish near the river’s mouth, 377 acres of damaged trees and other vegetation along the riverbank, and an unknown number of alligators. When state officials hit the company with a multimillion-dollar fine for the damage done, it declared bankruptcy and shut down."
https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/news-and-profiles/2017/04/f...