Today is day 73 of the unimaginable and intriguing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
I grew up on the Alabama coast on Perdido Bay, where I learned the meaning of adventure. We lived it, and we pushed it in a special wilderness Paradise. In the days of the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s I experienced a wide array of life in the pristine waters the waters of Perdido Pass, which is the narrow inlet connecting the Bay and the Gulf of Mexico…shark, tarpon, manta ray, leopard ray, sting ray, bluefish, pompano, Spanish mackerel, King mackerel, mahi mahi, bonito, tuna, jack, sea turtles, and many other forms of beautiful wildlife. It is very rare to see such wildlife there now.
The biodiversity of Perdido Bay has been laid waste by a paper mill plant in Florida, by agricultural run-off, and is now threatened further by the ongoing oil spill.
I’ll describe some aspects of what I know about petro as I have experienced it and researched it.
A barrel of crude oil is taken down in an elaborate technological process called fractional distillation, or “cracking.” This process distills off innumerable hydrocarbon fragments from light molecular weight to heavier molecular weight fragments. The distillation is accomplished in a rather tall tower with numerous sideports coming off of its length which allows escape of the next useful liquid fraction of the crude black gold. These fractions are then developed into the end products; from jet fuel, to advanced machine lubricants, to butane and propane, to plastics, to pesticides, to cosmeceuticals, and yes, to pharmaceutical carrier bases.
We can thank, or curse, the Rockefeller oil and banking magnates of a century ago for pushing this pharmaceutical petro distillate residue into assisting with the formation and growth of the pharmaceutical industry. The distillate residue material became the carrier base of the synthetic pharmaceutical drugs, and helped to burgeon this new industry. Synchronistically, the crackdown on holistic practitioners, most notably homeopaths and chiropractors, began. This was around the 1920’s.
This is another dismal story about big industry forcefully harassing and pushing out the little guy, the legitimate and community helpful “competition.” This is the rise of Big Pharma which has grown its chokehold on the medical schools, assisting the training of physicians to practice a fear based approach, and naturally driving up the price tag.
Some humanitarian pharma company should donate some of those Big Pharma dollars to studying the placebo effect, as well as the nutrient depletion effects caused by the use of pharmaceuticals. I doubt Big Pharma will help finance such studies about human health, but they will throw $500,000,000 at the development of the average drug in Phase I, II, III, and IV clinical trials.
After the fractional distillation, or “cracking,” the distillate then goes on to the industrial engineers over at Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, and many other petro plastic industries, who proceed to transform the distillate into the many many products that we are unconsciously addicted to in our ongoing daily usage.
A story of Monsanto’s toxic and destructive practices is the former production of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB’s), which began in a Monsanto plant in Gadsden, Alabama on the Coosa River in the late 1940’s. This is one example of big industry run amok. The Coosa River is now permanently contaminated with this carcinogenic compound in high concentrations. The half life degredation of PCB’s is in the thousands of years.
You can read about this in a book by Theo Colburn which came out in the 1990’s entitled Our Stolen Future. Another good historical documentary of our pollution problem is Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream.
I once took a flat round smooth river rock out of the Coosa River downstream near Wetumpka, Alabama. It was discolored an unnatural dark black hue. I cleaned and bleached the rock in the sunshine and then printed the word PATIENCE on it, and this rock now resides in our geodesic growing dome greenhouse.
I recommend this site if you want to have your own extraordinary enclosed growing space, a geodesic polycarbonate greenhouse. What’s that polycarbonate made from? It is made from petro! Don’t worry about it. They are worth every penny, and will reduce your carbon footprint.
The geodesic Grow Dome is a very good investment in these times. They are very easy to order, construct, energize with life, and maintain. The headquarters is just over in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The owners and staff are dedicated and excellent.
These domes are common in Crestone, and are spreading all across the US of A. The once slippery smooth river rock is now residing and contributing its message to a small jungle of greenery which we eat from daily. I am thinking that by growing what we eat, we are helping out with the carbon footprint issue which Amanda Little covers in her book Power Trip. I also imagine the healing of the Coosa, and the Alabama River systems.
The Monsanto PCB’s were used as insulators in those big cylindrical transformer contraptions up on electrical line poles which lined our highways and byways. PCB’s are xenobiotics. Xeno (Greek etymology) is anything not made in nature, but is introduced by human manufacturing from the petro world. Moreover, xenobiotics are largely xenoestrogenic; i.e., they mimic estrogen at estrogen receptors in the body. This is very negative for both sexes of all creatures, including the male alligators in Florida whose genitalia have been compromised. There are thousands of xenoestrogens now. They are procarcinogens, and also precarcinogens.
After PCB’s were finally outlawed, Monsanto just kept on producing other toxic and destructive substances. Now they have mafia-like goon squads that go about our agricultural farmlands and literally harass farmers into buying their genetically modified seed year after year. See the video documentory Food, Inc. for some enlightenment on the Monsanto wonder industry. GMO seeds do not produce seed bearing plants for the next year. You have to keep buying the Monsanto seed in order to sustain your crop growing.
One important suggestion may be to stock up on non hybrid (heirloom) seeds before the Monsanto goons choke off the real seed industry, as they are mercilessly attempting to do. Seriously, it will be difficult to procure non hybrid seeds in the near future. It is best to be a year early than a second late.
This is a mafia monopoly in its most obvious form. Why does this go on? Because Monsanto owns a large influence in Washington, D.C., and they are a colluding power in the FDA. The FDA seems to be a collusion in and of itself. You eat their toxic foods, develop some expected toxic disease states, and then you go to the medical industry to eat their toxic pharmaceuticals, many of which are redundant and unnecessary.
I have also learned in my travels that many of the pharmaceuticals are life saving. These should be used in the short term to stabilize the problem, and then, more natural efforts made to restore health balance in the long term.
We are just assisting in the usage and disposal of the fractional distillates, and we are assisting in the financial enrichment of a number of, gee, greedy people and industries. This one twisted spin of this perspective, and it’s unfortunately true.
Monsanto also brought us another highly toxic product called RoundUp to help us kill our weeds. This destructive product also gets into our local water tables. This is a very bad petro crack-off, as are all of Monsanto’s products. Dow and DuPont are little better. Do you need to be wearing all of that poly clothing?
Try some natural fibers instead. You can think about cotton, natural animal fibers of all sorts, silk, and you can even save those hemp and burlap bags and get creative. My personal use of poly clothing is rare. I don’t enjoy the way it feels on my body, with rare exceptions for exercise and hiking in the mountains, when poly undercloth is good at wicking moisture away from the skin. I have declared a moratorium on buying anymore poly clothing. My wardrobe is probably 99% natural cloth.
Petro distillates, of all sorts, are lipophilic; i.e., they are “fat loving” and tend to accumulate in our fat cells, which are functionally necessary all over our anatomy and physiology. With America’s current obesity problem, you can imagine that many overweight people are aslo suffering from the extra added burden of many more petro hydrocarbon by-product sequestration concerns.
In further regards to fractional distillation of a barrel of crude oil, the petro industry taps off the top 60% of the barrel, and sends this off to various and sundry industries as is mentioned above, where some big bucks are turned out from the innumerable fractional by-products.
Then we have the residual 40% of the barrel of crude, considered a waste by-product after the finer stuff is tapped off. Guess what this 40% yields?
That’s right, it is turned into gasoline, asphalt, and tires for the vehicles. We are driving around in petro waste disposal units, called automobiles. The petro industry needs those internal combustion engines (ICE) and roadways and tires to keep the full usage of the full barrel cranking along. Why, it’s a wonder industry, helped along by that wonder decade, the 1950’s. You would have to have been born in the 1950’s, or before, to really know in your bones what happened in those days.
This full industrial push for the consumption of fractional distillates is why the green eco automotive industry has been delayed so long. It has been a control play. An example of this history has been documented in the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
Another death one can learn about is who killed Stan Meyer, the inventor of a Brown’s gas generator; a device so effective that he drove a car from NYC to LA on 26 gallons of water!!! A Brown’s gas generator hydrolyzes water into combustible hydrogen, and also into oxygen which naturally assists the combustion. If you can just manage to get the mixture piped into your conventional carburetor, you will experience serious gas mileage enhancement.
I have seen Crestonians do this with mason jars and electrodes under their hoods. The mason jars freeze in the winter, and crack, but the primitive technology is easily doable in the modern ICE age of automotive wonders. Automotive engineers could just start putting high tech Brown’s gas generators in the ICE autos coming off of the line. You can thenfill your gas tank with gas, but less of it. And then you could fill the hydrolyzer device under the hood with—WATER!!!
Better yet, let’s just rebuild and retool and improve on Stan Meyer’s technology, which was all whisked away by some people in suits after he was killed.
Stan Meyer was assassinated after refusing billions of Saudi oil money to buy him out, and shut him up, and make him and his success go away. He should be sainted, and his technology revived, and built into current assembly lines as one important incremental step to help Gaia.
More hybrid automobile brands are becoming available. In the near future the electric car will be revived by visionaries.
Regarding another by-product of crude oil, I have something in common with NASA, NASCAR, the airlines industry, and the professional bicycle industry…we fill our tires with nitrogen.
You can read about this at the Nitofill website, and then go and find a nitrogen source at some of the tire companies in your town. It cost on average about $10 per tire for a fill, but it is worth it.
Nitrogen increases tire life and durability. A simple way to decrease a little petro dependence is to lengthen the artificial obsolescence built into tires by inflating your tires with nitrogen.
Signing off from Crestone and Beyond.