TREES

https://www.fs.fed.us/nrs/news/review/review-vol26.pdf

LISA HANNA

Dear MP Hanna,

It was very pleasing to see you enjoying a little (much, much deserved) R&R. I seem to be on a list that allows me to make comments. Thanks for the inclusion.

The shut down is auspicious. Bauxite needs to manage their sites in completely different ways--primarily planting forests on all surfaces that are not involved in actually mining or transporting. This would also include vegetation-covered roofs. Even those huge earthen piles could be covered with some sort of vegetated net. Could it work to run the emissions along the edges in perforated tubes and cover them with carbon absorbing plants?

https://www.facebook.com/STANN360/photos/a.485155942119/10156909125047120/?type=3&theater&ifg=1

Whoever will be accountable while having the people's interest at heart

There may be a requirement to do things outside the norm that genuine leaders must initiate by themselves. If any leader would authoritarianism, I imagine it would be you. Not many, if any, people could have summoned the vision of a Marcus Garvey. He had to lead from the top, while never losing site or respect for people at the bottom.

I'm afraid I have rather accommodationist tendencies, tending to proceed gradually along commonsense lines that at least do no harm.

I replaced each name with a letter of the alphabet for the sake of privacy

conversation on Restoring St. Ann's Bay.

 A wrote: then what?

Trevor Burrowes: "...they will be closing down at the mines at water valley for 2 or 3 months but it wont be closing down in discovery bay contract workers will be laid off and permanent workers who operate machines will go to discovery bay and work. That's why they are working extra hard right now to carry most of the bauxite to dbay right now👍"

Trevor Burrowes: There's plenty of off-road space (see the image) to plant trees to absorb the pollution. There's one good example at bottom right. So why don't they do that all over the grounds? How hard is it to plant trees?

B wrote: They need to get out and stop raping the country's resources, we need all the red dirt we can keep #farmerlife

Trevor Burrowes i GUESS THEY FIGURE THEY NEED ALUMINUM FOR PLANES (AND MANY OTHER INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS). (Sorry, caplock error). Even so, what's the excuse for not planting trees (as densely as that clump at lower right) on all the green areas?

B wrote: Jamaican bauxite has been finished we need to keep all our dirt and share it with farmers especially those on poor soils, our attitudes must change of towards our longevity and survival, agriculture and forestry are the only sustainable pathway that are renewable for our survival, every other resources are limited and temperamental..

C wrote: I'm not an expert on this but it would seem practical for govt authorities to step in and require Noranda to gather all the sargasso seaweed polluting the beaches and truck it up to strip mined sites, spread it where they have not replaced the top soil and it will in due time decompose and help to heal the land.

Trevor Burrowes: I love the idea. The tree idea was to deal with whatever is transmitted that cause cancer clusters. But trees ought to help the respiratory system in the age of COVID too?

C wrote: In a properly designed composting operation the decomposing pile of organic material will have perforated piping that channels methane gas to fuel a small incinerator that burns plastic waste to produce a baseline amount of energy to make the whole operation self sustaining.

Trevor Burrowes: Wonderful energy idea! So they'd have more than one product interacting. Undoubtedly, these varied ideas should be given expert scrutiny. My perforated tube idea was to replace the smokestack with a perforated conduit and cover it with constantly renewed CO2-absorbing plants. That would be work for farmers. So instead of a net environmental nightmare bauxite mining could be a kind of environmental plus.

C wrote: Trevor, there was a lady from the Cockpit Country Warriors group with a catchy name, I think it was Miduntalk Wright, who is apparently a Jamaican in Toronto who organized a protest against the Jamaican Embassy in Toronto to protest mining in the Cockpit Country of Jamaica. If you could recruit her that would be great!

ASSORTED ISSUE, LOCAL OR OTHERWISE (including the Weeks Street Primarty School

GETTING RID OF MEGATRUCK THROUGH TRAFFIC

It took incredible sacrifice, discipline and procedural smarts to get the large cement and gravel trailer trucks off Highway 14. The process was driven by firmness and determination, but was never nasty. And it became eventually evident to be one of cooperation and mutual respect. 

THOUGHTS ON FOOD PRODUCTION AND PLANNING, ETC.

Growing your own food is very hard, and only the most dedicated and/or talented can make a success of it. Since I'm not in the latter category I try to help with food production at the edges, looking for ways to support it from outside the industry.

Among my major interests (and perhaps abilities) is comprehensive planning. In comprehensive planning , one examines as many relationships as possible, much as a good artist might. And as with an art project, there is much that is subjective and qualitative along with what is scientific and rational. So I don't believe there is a single approach to food production, but many, including many that are experimental and unresolved. For instance, I favor no-till growing that doesn't disturb top soil. But I'm so far from being able to recommend it for universal food production that it behooves me to back off the subject and allow others to carry on with their own practices which have wide practicality and acceptance. 

But I do have ideas to share that connect to those wider planning relationships I mentioned. Some of these pertain to Jamaica:

WHAT IS THE PICTURESQUE? (It applies to the feeling of infinity in the distant views along the Turquoise Trail.)

"The concept was propagated by the statesman and writer Edmund Burke. His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful argued that both beauty and the overwhelming experience of the Sublime were perceived emotionally, and generated by subjective rather than objective criteria. Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are exclusive. His idea of the Sublime was a contrast to the classical perception of beauty as the pleasurable experience described by Plato in several of his dialogues, and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality able to establish feelings of powerful emotion, creating a pleasant experience. Burke’s thesis also concentrates on the physiological effects of the Sublime, mainly the emotional quality of fear and attraction."

https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/theories-of-the-picturesque-and-the-sublime-english-literature-essay.php

STALLS

- Food stalls can be sanitary and picturesque at the same time. The roughness is the charm, the soul, the magnetism of the Jamaican scene.

- There can be ruggedness and uniformity at the same time. That would derive from system. Not just a scientific medical system, but also an aesthetic one too. (Jamaica must avoid too much sterility, too much surrendering of soul and color). 

- Food stalls might or might not be integrated with housing, depending on the local situation.

- Food stalls focusing on the vending of local food can also "sell" or "project" cultural ideas that have potential social and economic benefit. This includes materials and design approaches with effects that could be germaine to tourism.

HOUSING

- There is an existential crisis in affordable housing. Existing housing practices are driven by profit, and are hobbled by conformity to inappropriate social and environmental ideas.

- Relatively small adaptations to housing can facilitate food growing in and around the structures themselves.

- Planning around water and various critical issues of governance can benefit Jamaican livelihood.

FACEBOOK AND GOVERNANCE: ISSUES

- Facebook may be a medium of "soft governance."

- Reporting to relevant government authorities.

- Non political, auxiliary, voluntary  people's governance.

- Need for cooperative people on the ground.

- Liaising with the PM for mutual support.

- Need for links with government. 

- Reasons to focus on St. Ann parish.

- "Restoring St. Ann's Bay" is vision oriented.

- How to leverage small amounts of money.

- Tourism as a matrix for issue convergence.

- Minimalist strategy in keeping with limited resources. 

CAROL CARPENTER

- Carol Carpenter spoke about a charter school for Madrid in five years. That was four years ago. 

- Carol was then employed half the year on the east coast in a very high level job. She is now here full time, and if the vice chair of the Community College.

-  Could this be discussed?: Make the Madrid school an experimental extension of the Community College? Reflecting their curricular resources?


MANIFESTO

- Land (including place) is more important than people. People emerge from and are dependent on land, and not the other way around

- Aesthetics are the most useful guide: "Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth," or whatever it was Keats said.

- The poor need close to 100% of our social attention. Yes, a rising tide lifts all boats

- We got into the mess we're in by throwing things, places, peoples, cultures and languages away. We must stop doing this

- Children are the new slaves to run energy on. Historically, energy depended on human slavery, morphing into fossil fuel slavery (on which we now ENTIRELY depend, while it tanks along with it correlated economic system.

- Substituting children as the energy source doesn't mean cruel or stupid forms of coercion; it's just that there might be no other energy source that allows ANYONE to survive.



JANET

1) Cooperation:

- You are the only person in Jamaica I'm aware of who is not somehow closed off from the diaspora. Others will occasionally chime in, do great things, then when your hopes are raised, will totally disappear. They simply won't answer you. One feels spurned, hurt, but there being no other choice, one hangs on and posts here or there. Thanks for being you, Janet!

2) Strategy:

- We must have strategy, or else we'll just keep throwing thoughts out into the wind, whence the rubber never hits the road, and there is no structure to build onto. I'm particularly guilty of that. But what's the alternative?

- Covid-19 will probably be the best chance we've had in our lifetimes to get in there and be listened to. Can we squeeze through the crack which the virus presents? 

- Are there three specific things you'd like to see that I can help with...possibly in exchange for your helping me likewise? Or even one specific project. You had mentioned planting something for the public outside your window. I want to board up that little wood structure in St. Ann's Bay. 

3) Building: 

- We seem to have related visions there. I am more than willing to continue making little diagrams on grid paper of whatever design projects can be mutually decided on.  It's easy enough to transmit electronically, and the grid means that things can be measured more easily, thus relatable to children who can be brought in to participate.

What are your thoughts?

Trevor

KILLING THE FARMER (POSTED ON fACEBOOK AS A POLEMIC (WORD), since farming is problematic too.

There's a lot of cement building development.

Cement development is a heavy user of water.

There's a lot of hotel development.

Hotel development uses a whole lot of water.

There's a lot of deforestation.

Deforestation causes drought. 

Whoever is supporting cement, bauxite, and hotel development, or deforestation, is killing the farmer. 

HOW DO WE AVOID FOOD WASTE IN AN EMERGENCY?

- The scale shown in this picture is massive, and may be meant for international markets.

- This global trade usually runs on a JIT (just in time) economic system. Notthing is stored for long and shipping and trucking is organized to get the food where it needs to be sold...just in time.

- This involves a very large supply chain to all parts of the system. 

- The ships and trucks must be refrigerated, their fuel must come from somewhere, workers at all levels have to be paid. 

- There's a long chain of parts to this system of supply, and the chain is as strong as its weakest link. If one link fails, the entire chain fails. 

- This system is run on volume at global scale

Can Jamaica Have More Of A Local System? 

- There's a welcome trend toward importing less foreign food, and growing more locally.

- Hotels, restaurants, supermarkets are plentiful here, and could normally buy the local food.

- But in an emergency where most of them close down, the food would need to be stored, even if eventually given away?

- There is very poor storage of food in Jamaica now, and farming people are calling for a better arrangement.

- Distribution to the needy needs some kind of structure where you know where and when to distribute food.

- The distribution costs money--workers, gas, time.

Proper Storage May Be The Key

- There is storage for normal times--short periods

- But what about storage in an ememrgency for longer?

- Does there need to be redundant storage?

- In and emergency, we might lose electricity.

- Could ice help? 

- How do you rationalize the cost of producing and storing ice just for the occasional emergency?

- You would need a whole lot of redundant ice boxes too, but that could be the easy part. 

- Jamaica needs a lot of sored electricity for emergencies. Batteries to store solar energy are WAY expensive, and would be in short supply in an extreme pandemic-like situation (or economic calamity).

THE PRIZE FIGHTER

The world order is like a fit prize figHter in the ring. The public are like a pudgy, sedentary baby boomer opposing the prize fighter. But the worst thing is that the public also has both hands tied behind it. You could untie the hands and force the public to train, but it's not the best equipped to deal with a fit, experienced prize fighter, and it would be unlikely to prevail even with the best preparation. Still, untie the hands, train the individual to box and retreat from blows, and he might hang in there a bit longer.

REAL ESTATE PRICES

"...the real estate bubble is a product of local and (in some cases) state government policy — one of many arrangements that benefits the well-to-do at the expense of the poor. (People who own real estate benefit from rising land prices, people who have to rent suffer from it.) Until governments are forced by one means or another to abandon the policies that drive up rents and real estate prices, any decline in the real estate market will be temporary."

John Michael Greer