Eureka! Water fills the Space!

Recycling water is a very sensible idea in this day and age. Firstly, we have less living biomass to bring naturally clean, filtered water. Also, with metropolises bursting at their overfed seams, it is time for the piping of water to be rethought.

The dual pipe system is a very good idea. Household and industrial water is removed and reused (cleaned) as industrial water (after all, industry rarely needs distilled standard water). Clean river and rain water is used for household use. Effluent (toilet) water could be kept on a third system, separate from household water and commercial use. Commercial water that was first used as toilet water is fine, but for something else the future is bringing to us. The small methane gas power generators that will be a standard feature of a house, just like the rainwater tank or the solar power grid. These things are inevitable as the well fed populations of today expand.

Using the recycled effluent water for drinking is unwise as it may still have traces of minerals and antibiotics that contaminate it. Sure, it is probably clean physically, but energetically one cannot be so certain. In homeopathic schools of thought, water retains the vibration of what it has contained. If it has flowed through rivers or fallen as rain, it is fit for consumption. Also, psychologically, having water that is "pure" can really effect public morale.

Also, with cleaning water to reuse for drinking, mistakes can be made. Although it is a slim risk, if it went wrong (old, dirty equipment, wear and tear, human error) the effects could be dire, with huge class actions (legal bills). The costs of maintaining a system to a very high standard so the risks of disaster are lessened and insurance must be taken into account by both governments and private operators who are contemplating using waste water for household use. When times are easy it can look good to do, but what about when times are tough? If there are serious cutbacks on spending in leaner times, could cost saving endanger users?

I think letting recycled flow back into the ground water system is fine. Ponds, pools, lakes, rivers, mires (particularly) will clean the water as it passes through silt and plant life. In the homeopathic sense, it is re-energized by being in nature. If returning it to river systems, deltas are a better choice then rivers flowing inland, because of cases of disaster, but also there are more bogs and swamps, which is one natures ways of causing extremely clean waters.

Rates and taxes (and tax exemptions) could easily arranged to encourage good water use, pay for production costs and even raise revenue for other projects. One can imagine that in the near future laws being passed that the building industry must include a water tank, recycled water pipes, solar panels and methane gas power generators. New suburbs will require water recycling facilities. These are all potential cash cows for governments. At worst, they will pay their way.

Cooling Forest Fires

Here is an idea for reducing the severity of wild fires, bushfires and forest fires where they are very common. Anywhere that has had several instances of severe heat fires, especially where it was so hot it was difficult for the plants to rejuvenate or regerminate, replanting the hot spots with fire resistant plants or stone structures such as roads or walls, may well be an idea for cooling future fires.
This could save home and land owners, governments and insurance brokers a small fortune in finances and human cost.
With global warming tipping the balance gently, it could be wise to buffer up the hot spots like that, just to tip it back the other way again. To do the full effort to counteract global warming through deforestation, planting a multilevel living biomass of fire resistant plants could help absorb some of the greenhouse gases. Some fire resistant plants are cash crops.

Natural Remedies For Reducing Methane In Livestock

One of the big produces of methane (a greenhouse gas) is the livestock industries (farm animals). Cows, sheep, goats, pigs etc, produce gas through their digestive system. Here's an idea, although it would only help partially.
Peppermint, or even the weed like mint, is a well known herb for helping digestion and easing stomach gas and cramps. If you gave livestock peppermint or mint (very easy and cheap to grow) in their feed, maybe it could reduce gases. It would also reduce the incidence of bloating, bloating related vet bills, and help make a healthier animal.
You could grow peppermint, or mint, in the field, or add it to hay or grain feed, or feed it to them separately. In the wild, the animals ancestors of modern livestock had access to a lot of different plants. They would graze on a variety of wild, naturally formed grasses, and herbs, and nibble on bushes. Their diets were rarely a monotone of exactly the same plant day in and day out. Near rivers there were rices, on the plains were all kinds of grain grasses. Near forests or in heathers, marshes and plains were herbs and scrub which added to there diet's variety. I would almost guarantee that they ate certain things deliberately for certain conditions. Peppermint would almost certainly be one of those plants.
Observing their wild counterparts in a natural native environment to see what they do to ease certain health problems could lead to all sorts of possible natural cures for livestock health issues. If they nibble on certain bushes or herbs or vines for certain conditions, like stomach pain, gestation, wounds or whatever, growing the plants in paddocks (as ground cover or hedgerow) saves a lot of time and monitoring. You do not have to give the animal the cure, it just takes it as needed. Then, if further help is needed, the animal is observed, like a pet cat eating grass. Nurseries could benefit financially from selling the plants and farmers could save a lot of time and effort after the initial start up, and time and effort is money and health. Some plants grown as trees and bushes in hedges or as herbs could be extended as well as a cash crop.
Sheep and other animals that tend to chew cud, there is a lot of greenhouse gas burped up. In their stomachs and intestines there is a conglomerate of all kinds of interesting bacterias in a mini ecosystem of their own, hopefully balanced for the comfort and health of the animal. Here is another idea. With a little research, a (or a few) good bacteria for these animals, that produce less methane or bad gases, can be isolated, developed and grown for commercial reasons. Like pro-biotics. Then, the bacteria can be fed to the animals, the logical time being when they are lambs or at the milk feeding age. Current systems of economy that sell preventative medicines for livestock could benefit from it financially.
An interesting fact, incidentally, is that herbivores stand facing north while they are grazing. If you are lost in the country and need to know where north is, just look which way the grazers are pointing. That's north. It is a bit mysterious but probably has a very reasonable explanation to why. The how is probably magnetic. Maybe it has something to do with the sun or predators (of the past).

Glossary
Cud - grazing animals who have more then one stomach vomit up food from one stomach, chew it again, and then pass it into it's next stomach.
Herbivores - animals that eat plants only.
Pro-biotics - good bacteria eaten for their beneficial effects on the digestion, like yogurt.

Cures for Eutrophication

Eutrophication is where still or slow bodies, or parts of bodies, of water gain excess nutrients that weren't absorbed by the earth/living biomass. The nutrients stimulate excess plant growth (such as algae, or macrophytes, which are aquatic or semi-aquatic plants), resulting in a reduction of dissolved oxygen (hypoxic) in the water chemistry, suffocating the oxygen using aquatic animal life, especially immobile ones like fixed shellfish. The dead algae, bacteria, and fish sink to the bottom thus escalating the toxic fermenting nutritive situation. Also, some of the algae and bacteria (like cyanobacteria) are toxic, and get into the food chain, building up through to the predators (such as humans), damaging or killing them. It works like a negative feedback loop.
Where do these extra nutrients come from? The two biggest problems is phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilisers and sewerage. Fertilisers leach into the ground water and then into the drains, river systems and ocean from lawns, golf courses and other grounds, and agriculture. Nitrogen seems to affect fresh water systems and phosphorus affects salt water systems. Since the 1950's, due to human activity, phosphorus on the earth's surface has been raised by 4 times. Let's look at these chemicals.
Phosphorus is mined as apatite, a mineral compound. It is dissolved in sulfuric acid, releasing the phosphorus as a "super phosphorus", used in fertilisers. Animals eat plants and they absorb and excrete phosphorus, using it for ATP (energy utilisation), and it is a building block of RNA and DNA. Therefore phosphorus is found in excrement (sewerage and manure), which returns to the cycle, often through the waterways (these days).
Nitrogen is formed into ammonia in industry by putting atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen (usually from natural gas or petroleum) under great pressure and 600 degrees Celsius. This is used in fertilisers.
It is also formed from lightning, created in the great heat and energy of the event. It is also formed by bacteria and archaea in symbiosis with legumes (etc. alfalfa, soy, lentils). It is also found in the digestive system of termites and bivalves like shipworms. It is also free in soils. Also cyanobacteria have it in places like rice paddies.
Nitrogen is very stable as N2, so biologically an organism needs complex enzymes and a lot of ATP (energy) to utilise it. Nitrifying bacteria make it available to plant roots and crenarchae converts ammonia into nitrites.
Anaerobic bacteria (anaerobic means it doesn't use oxygen) living in deep soil and aquatic sediment has the task of denitrification, because it uses the nitrogen instead of oxygen. However, it is a slow process.
There are 375 hypoxic (oxygen depleted) coastal zones around the world. The results is an increased biomass of phytoplankton including toxic and inedible ones and an increase of soft, sticky zooplankton (phytoplankton predators). There is a decrease of beneficial algae, and macrophyte (aquatic plants) species change in range and amounts. The water becomes turbid (unclear), often getting blue, green or red blooms (often blocking out the light, which effects other plants). It looks and smells bad, and is difficult to treat, and the water's oxygen is reduced (especially at night when the plants breathe out carbon dioxide). Good, edible and harvestable shellfish and fish start dying off. It becomes dangerous to drink and swim in. The toxic anaerobic bacteria increase, poisoning fish, animals and birds. Extremes create "dead zones". The biodiversity is reduced, and species that prefer the new conditions start to invade (such as jellyfish in the ocean between China and Japan, which only the tough and virile would eat). Toxic algae blooms form, poisoning the food chain, with predators becoming diahorrhoetic, neurotoxic, and paralysed.
There are several things that can be done to reverse this situation. Firstly identifying the source is a good start. A point source is something definite such as a feedlot (that's where they keep livestock in a confined area, feeding them large amounts of food to fatten them, a cruel system which creates a lot of waste), or a raw sewerage pipe. Non point sources are things like the atmosphere (such as acid rain), or runoff (like when thawing snow takes manure into the storm drain).
Legislation for local and regional areas can protect particularly vulnerable areas such as lakes, estuaries and bays. If the farmers, fishers, sewerage treatment, water and dam workers co-operate, they reduce the risks to their interdependent industries. However, more remote places can be harder to police.
Riparian buffer zones along the banks of waterways act as a biomass that absorbs the sediments, nutrients and pollutants. This idea can be extended to buffer zones around farms, storm drains and roads, or between them and waterways. If the farmer also grows their orchards closer to waterways, and their crops of smaller plants (like grains) further away, it can have a riparian effect, as well as having the effect that the thirstier (usually bigger) plants are closer to the water source, saving time, energy and effort.
Using sewerage to run methane burning generators, especially in rural communities and large farms is a great system, as it provides electricity, reduces carbon waste, deals with the nitrogen and phosphorus, and provides a wonderful recycled fertiliser. China has established these already.
Nitrogen testing and modelling of the soil helps too. Often farmers, gardeners and groundskeepers use more fertilisers then they need to, which is wasteful and costly. Testing the soil to work out the least amount needed is very economical.
The farmer can also charge more for their products if they actually convert to the very fashionable organic farming, where demand still outstrips supply, so the grower can dictate prices, as opposed having the prices set for them by competition or a corporation.
Maintaining and protecting marshes and mangroves in estuaries etc is a natural filter. If they are damaged, drained or otherwise removed, there is nothing there to prevent silt, nutrients and erosion from wrecking havoc. They are a wonderful kind of halfway world where little fish hatch and feed in bizarre safety, like a surrealistic dream!
Because of the phytoplankton and alga outbreaks, introducing herbivore animals like bivalve shellfish to filter the plankton and then harvesting them is a great way to reduce the nutrients.
Adding beneficial macrophytes (aquatic plants), and macroalgae (seaweed), and then harvesting them is also a way to remove the nutrients from the cycle. Large coastal kelp forests with kelp grazers would be most effective. Reeds (some reeds absorb heavy metals), watercress, lilies, rice and seaweed are all cash crops.
If you allow reeds to grow in the marshlands and rivers, introducing or encouraging birds that eat micro-organisms (like a mud filter type thing) and use reeds to build their nests would be optimum. Also, insects that eat or otherwise harvest reeds are a good idea.
In the case of cyanobacteria, which lives in deep silt at the bottom, and is toxic, surely it has a predator? Looking for something in deep water like volcanic lakes may provide answers, as well as researching "bottom feeders" like catfish (probably not a likely candidate) or specialist worms who sift through deposits for food.
Introducing of extra useful and edible zooplankton and maybe krill could also reduce phytoplankton and algae blooms. They may need extra oxygen though. Agrobacteria reduce nitrates and give plants galls on their stems. However, adding species is an activity that needs a lot of thinking through, research and planning before being undertaken, as it can have unhealthy results if it has the wrong effect, such as the South American cane toads of Australia.
Oxygenating the water is another option, through pumping air or pure oxygen through the water or something like a watermill to stir the air through and to break up the stagnation could reduce the anaerobic build up.
Damming decreases silica going downstream in the silt, and added fertilisers creates cyanobacteria blooms, increasing toxicity. A ratio range of N:P:Si (1:1:16) is the best for maintaining the nutritive balance for a healthy biodiversity. Allowing tides and natural "flushing" from both up and down stream to flow uninterrupted increases high species diversity, by increasing edible phytoplankton species for zooplankton to graze upon, and so reducing blooms. Erosion and damming prevent flushing from either end, causing build up and stagnation. If there is damming, it could be flushed regularly to increase healthy ecology, or else the water gets "old" and bad. Build up can be cleared, rivers widened and bottlenecks opened.
Erosion also contributes to the excess nutrients in the water, so riparian buffer zones are essential. Personally I think if we continue to use chemicals the riparian buffer zones could be twice as wide. Stabilising dunes with appropriate living biomass on the coastal areas helps reduce erosion. Sand fences work sometimes temporarily, and it is useful to pin netting down to help establish seedlings such as sand grasses.
Anyway, there are some ideas. There are probably other ideas, however, if you use a little lateral logic. Just letting the natural world be and do it's own thing unmeddled with (just undo the permanent meddling artifacts) would probably be the best option, as it has amazing self healing powers and many blocks and checks built over many millennia to restore balance. However, that seems to be against the force of human nature. We always seem to try to "improve" things to pieces!

Climate Change

If you are interested in helping to do something about climate change, in a fun way, as well as getting involved with the more progressive in your community, there is a global network called http://www.350.org/ which is organising some enlightening educational activities for communities around the world to help with awareness. I happen to support Greenpeace (http://www.greenpeace.com/) and the Wilderness Society (http://www.wildernesssociety.com/), as well as Global Child (http://www.globalchild.com/) and Oxfam (http://www.oxfam.com/), as well as other ecological and social justice causes. I am not wealthy nor a saint, sometimes I'm a help and sometimes I'm a hindrance, but I am better off for it. I also try and minimise excesses, but that is not the easiest thing unless awareness comes into play.