Ecology and Participatory Democracy: March 2008

Sunday, March 30, 2008

What I think about biofuels & a couple of key links

I am for biofuels. I believe that perennial biofuel crops, such as timothy, willow, switchgrass, or nitrogen-fixing alder can be grown either as part of a long-term crop rotation, which includes turning the field into a pasture as part of the rotation, or as members of a polyculture.

Both of these scenarios would be enacted upon small fields, and the agricultural systems would be ideally organic, biodynamic, and cradle-to-cradle. I hope other environmental and social justice activists will cease their monolithic resistance to biofuels. We/they have been treating the issue as if it is a binary choice between crops & biofuels. (However there is no doubt in my mind that the choice between forest and agriculture is binary & we ought to choose forest, every time.) They seem to be unfamiliar with the real and excellent technique of long-term crop rotation for the management of agriculture.

That said, here's a recently published report, in it I find a warning about what could happen if we continue to allow industry to appropriate biofuel agriculture.

http://www.alter-eu.org/en/system/files/publications/expertgroupsreport.pdf

Labels: biofuel