Life and Spirituality

NOTE: do read the older post http://someitemshave.blogspot.in/2011/10/towards-green-life.html for a background to this one. S ome of my earlier posts have alluded to the possibility of a return to land as a way of creating jobs in developed economies such as that of the USA that is trying to deal with this issue. The last post described a layout of farmlands in designed narrow strips so as to minimize some of the hardships faced by rural communities. May I call these AM farms for convenience here. Let us consider a fifty into fifty mile irrigated land area divided up into AM farms and try and estimate roughly the expenses for creating them and the number of jobs that might be created by doing so. It would be necessary to divide the landmass into a grid of roads that are a mile apart in order to provide road access to all the farms for the purpose. One square mile of land area results in 50 AM farms laid back to back and facing two roads that are...

T he developed economies of the world, reeling under debt and rising unemployment, have been facing severe economic pressures ever since the crisis began in 2008. One may wonder as to where the future of developed economies is heading. The developed economies still lead the world in high technology manufacture such as such as computer chips, aircraft etc. They will probably continue to do so for several more decades. However for the rest of manufacturing, ranging from undergarments to motorcars, it appears that high standards of living coupled with high wages in developed countries makes much of manufacturing uncompetitive in a globally trading world. It is partly for this reason that economies of the BRIC countries are growing rapidly while developed economies stagnate or struggle with insignificant growth. The largest of developed economies, the US, that is largely consumer driven hopes to grow once again if consumer demand increases. However a sustainable future for mankind...

Off you go into the countryside T here was a time when a very substantial portion of the human population lived off the land in rural areas scattered across the planet. Since the industrial revolution, large portions of human population began to move towards cities to engage themselves in industrial production and other pursuits related to an urban life.  Consumption of energy and industrial production began to increase and with advent of things like antibiotics,  human population too began to increase rapidly. Nations that could produce and consume at increasingly large rates or provide for increasing consumption to other parts of the world grew rapidly. It is here that an inherent paradox and contradiction began to be built into modern economies. Many realize that the current rates of consumption in the most developed economies such as the US are not sustainable. As resources like energy and materials diminish, the planet may run out of cheap resources. On the other ...