Central Montana along the upper Missouri River
Yesterday a friend said that many ideas in 'Let The Buffalo Roam' were quite like those in Richard Manning's 'Grassland' written in 1997. i don't think i ever read any of it but...who knows. His newest release 'Rewilding the West' sounds great, Richard Manning begins: "The most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command". As he tells the story of this once rich, now mostly empty landscape, Manning also describes a grand vision for ecological restoration, currently being set in motion, that would establish a prairie preserve larger than Yellowstone National Park, flush with wild bison, elk, bears, and wolves. Manning proposes that we now find the wisdom to let the prairies remake us. Please read Manning's new book, i will.
Another interesting email centered on building bridges and overpasses. He suggested we could re-use the miles of abandoned steel track left behind on spur lines. He suggested thousands of people could be employed as reverse John Henry's, who become a new steel lifting man. Further, the millions of treated wooden ties liberated in the process could morph into forming material. More honest work, love it. My answer centered on the aggregate, binding agent and the CO2 sequestration that might be achieved is by embracing new cement technology which features the blending pozzolans with Portland cement and adding mineraliser additives to reduce process temperatures.
The potential rates of carbon sequestration due to improved range land management practices have been shown to rise from 50 to 150 (kilograms carbon per hectare per year). We're talking about millions of hectares, billions of tons of CO2 passively sequestered by encouraging the grasslands by letting the buffalo roam. Millions of jobs building fencing, fences, overpasses and old track removal.
Millions of jobs, rebuilding something big. Hands on work, for to long people have lost jobs to inappropriate technology. Bigger wages often meant no job security, robots and accountants ruled, their jobs went offshore, their hearts went too. Now to many people are outta work, down on their luck, foreclosed on and pissed off. FDR built with a similar excess of labor, he taxed the rich and redistributed a small portion of the American pie. Maybe that's impossible now that the corporations own everything, maybe not.
Corporate control is so depressing that people who call themselves anything politically—liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, independents, tea partyers or anarchists—should be acting together against the corporate criminals. Independent action, freely chosen, awakens the actor. At some point enough independent actions and unexpected acts of resistance would be called an insurrection. The success of this insurrection wouldn't depend on the size of the crowd nor extent of the media coverage, but on its usefulness, through a million tiny awakenings, in bringing corporate capitalism to a grinding halt.
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt
