Relevance of A Safe and Sustainable World
by Nancy Jack Todd
Take One:
There's an old wisdom that goes...if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, he eat for a lifetime. Well that worked in theory, but what eventually happened was that the man and his sons fished until they exhausted the lake's productivity. Rather the lesson they needed to learn was, instead of being fish hunters, rather to become fish farmers so that their community would be able to eat and go on eating indefinitely.
In some ways the high seas have been the last bastion of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and those days are coming to a close. And it's not enough to try and solve the problem by creating vast fish farms if the waste goes untreated and the high seas are seined empty to feed the farm-raised fish.
What is needed is the ability to grow edible fish in a sustainable manner, a challenge which the New Alchemy Institute undertook and accomplished to a remarkable degree. And so our challenge is to first recreate their success, and then work to solve the problems that limited their accomplishments.
One of their major achievements lay in use of solar energy to grow a warm water fish in a cold climate, and not just any fish, talapia. That is significant for a number of reasons; for example, there's no chance that an inadvertent escape of farm raised fish can establish themselves and disrupt the local ecology. In Windward's case, the state of Washington allows the growing of the non-native talapia because any fish that escaped into the wild would not be able to suvive in the cold water of the Columbia, let along the snow-fed water of the Klickitat.
Another advantage is that warm water fish are unlikely to fall prey to fish diseases that are adapted to cold water fish.
And another is that there is a ready, local market for tilapia since they're already carried in our local Safeway.
A second major achievement was their being able to exceed "unity" in that they were able to grow a pound of fish on less than a pound of feed. That was possible, not because they were the magicians that their name implied, but rather because tilapia are able to sein planton out of the water; by growing tilapia in cylindrical tanks with clear sides, they were able to convert sunlight into plankton which tilapia would then consume as "free" food.
A third major achievement was the extent to which they were able to combine living space with biologically productive space. There's another old wisdom that holds that nothing fertilizes like the feet of the gardener, or that nothing fattens the calf like the eye of the master. The point being that the more involved and aware you are, the more likely your operation is to be successful.
What could be better than making your home within a living environment that is there to nourish your body and spirit?
Notes From Windward - Index - Vol. 67
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