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The Pomo were the first people living across the coastal ridges of northern California, where the author makes his home. We wonder constantly what they knew about living well with this land ...and was forgotten when the whitefella took over. They made the best baskets -- so good they could boil water in them! We suspect the land is making us more like them every day -- it's indigenizing us. Sadly, though, much of their special knowledge has been lost, and their baskets are better than we can ever hope to weave.

Much more about Steven Strong's work with roof-integrated solar panels and with sensible energy strategies can be found at his website.

DDT is considered one of our most dangerous endocrine disruptors. More on this topic may be found in a report of an international consensus at the Ecotech website, but in summary, DDT, apart from its known devastating effects on the eggshells of raptors, is also implicated in a number of human health problems from low sperm motility to increased cancer rates.

Current Solar Income means the energy that falls on us on a daily basis. This turns out to be an enormous amount of energy, nearly a kilowatt per square meter at temperate latitudes. It can be harvested directly using photovoltaic panels (which are only about 15% efficient) or stored as heat in hot water. Plants are the most efficient converters, using photosynthesis to convert sugar into food and biomass. For the purposes of this article, 'current' can be taken to mean 'this year', so shortfalls in winter can be met with summer's stored abundance. Biomass fuels -- firewood -- regenerate quickly, and are considered 'current solar income'. Fossil fuels, which require hundreds of millions of years and special circumstances which may never again occur on this planet, are not income, but an inheritance; burning them is the equivalent of squandering a fortune.

Substances from the earth's crust: petrochemicals, asbestos, uranium, chromium and the other heavy metals, mine tailings of all kinds, and the chemicals associated with extracting, purifying, and refining these substances... the list is endless, but suprisingly, the bulk of this damage has taken place in the 20th Century.

Substances produced by society which never before existed in nature, or existed in small quanities, and which are slow to decay. Plastic is a simple example, but some of the 'organics' are the worst of this breed. According to Theo Colborn, senior program scientist, who manages the Wildlife and Contaminants Program at World Wildlife Fund, "Everyone of you [reading this] is carrying at least 500 measurable chemicals in your body that were never in anyone's body before the 1920s." Is it any accident that in the same period of time, a whole new class of illnesses and diseases has appeared among us?

The physical basis: in a word, Nature. We are familiar with the loss of forests generally and in recent decades the rain forest, but the loss of tidelands, wetlands, grasslands, riparian margins, and the devastation of most of the other 'habitable' or 'tillable' land is even more cryingly important. From an ecological perspective, humanity has become a disease which has attacked the natural order, primarily with its heedless and arrogant assumption that all is here for our use. Many who subscribe to the Gaian Hypothesis expect that the Greater Organism will protect itself by shrugging us off like we shrug off a troublesome parasite. Of course, to us it won't feel like a shrug...

The Natural Step & the Hannover Principles     The observations and prohibitions expressed in this article were carefully explored by Karl-Henrik Robèrt, a Swedish oncologist who elicited the precepts through an exhaustive process of consensus-seeking among a large group of scientists. His work is carried forward in the United States by The Natural Step. I should note that he adds one further 'rule' -- We need fair and efficient use of resources to meet human needs -- with which I certainly agree, but for which I cannot make a case as an essential tenet of sustainability. The principles are adaptated from William McDonnough's 'Hannover Principles'.

drek: (Yiddish, taboo) "Human dung, feces, manure, or excrement; inferior merchandise or work; insincere talk or excessive flattery" -- A Dictionary of Yiddish Slag & Idioms

This page of definitions and opinions last updated 25 February 2001 : 11:42 Pacific time © 2001 Solar Utilities Network. All Rights Reserved. printed with 100% recycled electrons!