The widespread cultivation of an invasive non-native species of plant to solve an environmental crisis is just another environmental crisis.
Hemp, and cannabis, should be legal.
But this fetishization has to stop.
Billions of people all over the world have never faced a prohibition on the cultivation of hemp. Millions of tons of it are grown every year in China and across the world and there are no restrictions on its importation. Right now you can go on alibaba.com and get an entire shipping container of hemp delivered to your loading dock practically anywhere in the world.
Growing hemp has been legal for decades in much of Europe, forever in China, France, and Russia.
Articles like this only really lead to two possible conclusions:
1. Hemp isn't a wonder substance, or
2. All seven billion four hundred million people on Earth who aren't Americans are so stupid that they can't figure out how to turn hemp into miracle products and only the brave and skilled American men of science are capable enough to tease out its reclusive secrets where Europeans, Indians, Chinese, and others have failed after centuries of trying.
Yeah... I'm going to go with option 1. I've done a lot of traveling and there are smart people all over the world.
Articles like this are just the worst:
"It can be grown on a wide scale on nutrient poor soils with very small amounts of water and no fertilizers."
30 seconds talking to a Canadian or French hemp grower, or 15 seconds on your search engine of choice proves this, with decades of research by university and government agricultural department scientists to back it up (or hell just perusing one back issue of High Times) to be false.
Hemp is a plant like any other, it takes energy from the sun, carbon from the air, and material from the earth and turns them into plant matter.
In soils with poor nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur levels-- nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur must be added.
As much as I like hemp, this seems implausible. Trees sequester carbon for longer (as wood). If I was looking for a quicker alternative I'd plant bamboo (which also 'grows like a weed').
I suspect the best way is algae, but we'd likely destroy the oceans overusing it given humanity's inability to do things in a metered and sensible way.
Algae are interesting, but I don't see them as being ideal for tying up the carbon for long - we'd need to compress it into bricks and bury them, perhaps?
Aren't we already growing algae in the ocean about as fast as we can? Is there more we could be doing than manufacturing fertilizer on a geological scale and letting a lot of it end up washing out to sea? (Honest question, I haven't thought about this avenue of geoengineering before)
Well, you'd just have to find a way to store ("sequester") the plants for a few decades at least after their initial growth spurt, and you have a good carbon solution there.
I think most people would agree that "stop burning fossil fuels" is a utopian idea that doesn't actually work in practice. You're not going to get people to give up on it (at least near term) so you need to focus on solution that can actually be achieved.
In the American West at least, trees go up in flames every few years. Turning hemp into products people don't burn might be a better way to sequester carbon.
There are some very silly, and inconsistent prejudices around hemp. I'd be amazed to see consistent policy and use even if it can help the climate crisis more than everything else.
I'd map this to a different expression of the same goal.
If we plant trees for long-term remediation, what other thing can we plant, which achieves short-term remediation in local microclimate, has financial or other upsides, displaces things like woodchip or other plant fibres for commerce, can bootstrap an economy, and is easy to grow in marginal land?
Palm Oil is when it goes wrong: try and displace underground oil with biofuels and you encourage people to cut down rainforest to plant oil palm. But at reduced yield, re-foresting and re-planting lands with trees and hemp feels like a mutually beneficial idea. The trees are the 20+ year work. the Hemp is for smaller but immediate benefits.
I found their call for donations at the bottom troubling:
Hate racists? You’ll want to read this.
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That’s why we’re announcing our Make a Racist Cry campaign — where every dollar you give to Truthout will go directly to our ongoing efforts to make racists cry (because if there’s anything a racist hates it’s fearless journalism).
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Nothing ironic at all about hating people for hating people for their race :-|
Hemp, and cannabis, should be legal.
But this fetishization has to stop.
Billions of people all over the world have never faced a prohibition on the cultivation of hemp. Millions of tons of it are grown every year in China and across the world and there are no restrictions on its importation. Right now you can go on alibaba.com and get an entire shipping container of hemp delivered to your loading dock practically anywhere in the world.
Growing hemp has been legal for decades in much of Europe, forever in China, France, and Russia.
Articles like this only really lead to two possible conclusions:
1. Hemp isn't a wonder substance, or
2. All seven billion four hundred million people on Earth who aren't Americans are so stupid that they can't figure out how to turn hemp into miracle products and only the brave and skilled American men of science are capable enough to tease out its reclusive secrets where Europeans, Indians, Chinese, and others have failed after centuries of trying.
Yeah... I'm going to go with option 1. I've done a lot of traveling and there are smart people all over the world.
Articles like this are just the worst:
"It can be grown on a wide scale on nutrient poor soils with very small amounts of water and no fertilizers."
30 seconds talking to a Canadian or French hemp grower, or 15 seconds on your search engine of choice proves this, with decades of research by university and government agricultural department scientists to back it up (or hell just perusing one back issue of High Times) to be false.
Hemp is a plant like any other, it takes energy from the sun, carbon from the air, and material from the earth and turns them into plant matter.
In soils with poor nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur levels-- nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur must be added.