I feel heard, no one wants to talk about this with me!
We should be recycling human waste, not flushing it away and replacing those nutrients with industrially mined salts. But it's illegal most places to simply want to try.
A nutrient that sent me into a tailspin is B12. Defined as a necessary nutrient, yet nearly everyone in the West (and perhaps globally) is supplemented, either directly or via animal supplementation, with a vitamin produced in vats by bacteria that require cobalt, which is dependent on mining. It's not one that people worry a lot about because it takes a long time without it to have noticeable effects, and the argument is that you can easily get it from animal products. See the Vital Farms backlash: even free range, organic, put whatever label you want on it, is supplemented this way. Livestock have not been able to accumulate B12 naturally in several generations.
My point is that all of our proposed solutions, even organics and no-till farming, are not safe from this -- they still require remineralizing our soil, and how do we achieve that at a global scale without extractive mining? Cobalt is well known for being one of the worst in terms of human rights issues.
We can't just keep moving the extraction somewhere we can't see it, and I feel like that's a lot of the mainstream response. Perhaps I have just not stumbled on the right research yet. Agriculture is heavily mythologized and regulated, and it's hard to find niche information.
I am newish to Substack and looking for people to follow who are actively working on this and urban solutions. Drop your recommendations in the comments, please! :)
I feel heard, no one wants to talk about this with me!
We should be recycling human waste, not flushing it away and replacing those nutrients with industrially mined salts. But it's illegal most places to simply want to try.
A nutrient that sent me into a tailspin is B12. Defined as a necessary nutrient, yet nearly everyone in the West (and perhaps globally) is supplemented, either directly or via animal supplementation, with a vitamin produced in vats by bacteria that require cobalt, which is dependent on mining. It's not one that people worry a lot about because it takes a long time without it to have noticeable effects, and the argument is that you can easily get it from animal products. See the Vital Farms backlash: even free range, organic, put whatever label you want on it, is supplemented this way. Livestock have not been able to accumulate B12 naturally in several generations.
My point is that all of our proposed solutions, even organics and no-till farming, are not safe from this -- they still require remineralizing our soil, and how do we achieve that at a global scale without extractive mining? Cobalt is well known for being one of the worst in terms of human rights issues.
We can't just keep moving the extraction somewhere we can't see it, and I feel like that's a lot of the mainstream response. Perhaps I have just not stumbled on the right research yet. Agriculture is heavily mythologized and regulated, and it's hard to find niche information.
I am newish to Substack and looking for people to follow who are actively working on this and urban solutions. Drop your recommendations in the comments, please! :)
Damn…this is disturbing. My hope: may every human be given enough space to grow their own fresh food!
Greed