Part 2: Recycling: Key to Self-reliance, Homeostasis and Sustainability

Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. It is an alternative to "conventional" waste disposal that can save material and help lower greenhouse gas emissions (compared to plastic production, for example). (Wikipedia)

Dr Abe V Rotor

1. Recycling helps moderate global warming, the buildup of heat in the environment from increased human activity in a postmodern world. Recycling offers opportunity to everyone in doing his part in combating global warming, and the effects of El Niño.

2. Recycling corrects the growing imbalance of acidity and alkalinity of the soil and water (pH value). Too acidic or alkaline conditions lock up available nutrients useful to life, affect the physiology of living things. Recycling buffers acid rain which is responsible for the death of whole ecosystems like forests, coral reefs, and destruction of fields, pasture, seas, and even valuable pieces of art.

3. Recycling is not ideal where monoculture is practiced, thus it aims to lead farming back to a system of multiple cropping and integrated farming. Tri-commodity farms – production of crops, animals and fish – are best suited to recycling, and guarantee the gains in recycling itself.

4. Self-contained farming is therefore an important condition for recycling to succeed - and that recycling in return insures the success of the other. It is in principal and practice imitating nature. There is no formula in keeping our environment healthy and balance. This is indeed the answer to spiraling prices if farm inputs, and the decreasing productivity of farms.

5. E. Schumacher pointed out in his thesis and book, Small is Beautiful, that being small after all, is the alternative to corporate failure, the inability of bigness to adjust to change, analogously like “dinosaur syndrome”, which explains the failure of these primitive giants to survive abrupt change of their environment.

Continued