"Conspiracy" Documentaries

I love these things. I guess I would rather know all the arguments than be blindsided by sensationalist nonesense. The library is a perfect place to get my fix.

"Who killed the electric car" not my fave, but I watched it
"Gashole" about the big oil companies of the US squelching innovations in fuel economy/alternatives.

"Bowling for Columbine", "Sicko", "Farenheit 9/11",  "Capitalism" all by Michael Moore are great for making me feel superior as a Canadian (then I am embarrassed that I fell for that).

"An Inconvenient Truth" I liked it (guiltily) because I like looking at Gore. But even if half of what he said was blown out of proportion we are in big trouble.

For food I am a big fan of "Food Inc." and the DVD version of "Botany of Desire" is very pretty.

Just the other day I watched a well-done more personal documentary the other day called "King Corn" about the story of..... well, corn. Like "Food Inc" it mentioned the big seed and pesticide giants squeezing the small farmers, and how making this food a commodity (with subsidies by the govt to help) has made a massive surplus and still bankrupts the farmers. Worth the time to see.

But thinking about these things all together had me make an uncomfortable connections... Developing countries are slashing and burning giant sections of forest to plant ethanol crops. Not even food for themselves, but FUEL so we can feel "greener" about filling our SUV's.

YIKES!

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees, killing the golden goose AND throwing the baby out with the bathwater all at once!

And another thing. Corn. It's such an amazingly cheap plant material that chemists have turned it into almost everything but people food. With tweaks to structures, and a bit of energy, they can cheaply make it into fuel, plastics, high-fructose corn syrups, beast meal, etc, etc, etc. It's everywhere and that's not natural. But the worst part is that to grow THAT MUCH CORN, it is an empire based on a GMO seed that is doused in natural gas based pesticides/herbicides/fertilizers since before even being put in the ground and long afterwards. In one of these documentaries it mentioned how forcing these lowly grasses to yield so much they need to exploit many hundreds of times the natural "solar" nitrogen fixing units that a farmer could have provided in the 60's by way of crop rotations, compost, manure and other naturally derived fertilizers. Fossil fuel based fertilizers have a cool property that has captured and stored a whole lot of concentrated year's worth of plant/sunshine nitrogen. Once the scientists unlocked those solar elements to be usable by presently living plants -- whoah nelly! -- Farming was revolutionized! Specifically though, this corn stuff is taking literally thousands and thousands of acres to grow phenominal quanities of one genetically specific thing that simply cannot grow without the use of fossil fuels (and lets not forget about the energy needed to make the fertilizer or the toxic by products). And the soil that the corn crop occupies can grow NOTHING else because it is saturated with the fossil fuel derived materials.

What the heck are we humans doing?! I am worried for my kids.

hello again!

sorry I've been absent.

good stuff like birthdays and great quantities of work... bad stuff like hospital runs with family members (everything is under control now, don't worry).