Biomass Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Biomass. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Animals are the messengers of the tree, and trees the gardens of animals. Life depends upon life. All forces, all elements, all life forms are the biomass of the tree.
Bill Mollison (Permaculture: A Designers' Manual)
Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.
William McDonough, Michael Braungart
Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer’s biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals. As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies)
All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
War does not determine who is right—only who is left.” —Bertrand Russell
Nicholas Sansbury Smith (The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles #1))
Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.
William McDonough (Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things)
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” —Edgar Allen Poe
Nicholas Sansbury Smith (The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles #1))
The great success of ants and termites – between them they may comprise one-third of all the animal biomass of land animals – is undoubtedly down to their division of labour.
Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist)
Reality is only an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” —Albert Einstein
Nicholas Sansbury Smith (The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles #1))
It stands to reason that, until very recently, all vertebrate life on the planet was wildlife. But astoundingly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land animals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass. This Frankenstein biosphere is due both to the explosion of industrial agriculture and to a hollowing out of wildlife itself, which has decreased in abundance by as much as 50 percent since 1970. This cull is from both direct hunting and global-scale habitat destruction: almost half of the earth’s land has been converted to farmland.
Peter Brannen (The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions)
It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity – in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes – an interesting side branch. Of the twenty-three main divisions of life, only three – plants, animals and fungi – are large enough to be seen by the human eye33, and even they contain species that are microscopic. Indeed, according to Woese, if you totalled up all the biomass of the planet – every living thing, plants included – microbes would account for at least 80 per cent of all there is34, perhaps more. The world belongs to the very small – and it has done for a very long time.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies)
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” —Confucius
Nicholas Sansbury Smith (The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles #1))
Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.” —Mao Tse Tung
Nicholas Sansbury Smith (The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles #1))
All warfare is based on deception.” —Sun Tzu, The Art Of War
Nicholas Sansbury Smith (The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles #1))
Guerrillas war is a kind of war waged by a few but dependent on the support of many." —B.H. Liddell Hart
Nicholas Sansbury Smith (The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles #1))
I am not meant to be a biomass, I am a human being and I am born with a mission
Sunday Adelaja
People who are indifferent about the happenings around them are human biomasses.
Sunday Adelaja
A single high NH4 peak, traced to biomass burning across North America, begins at the [Younger Dryas] onset. It is the largest biomass-burning episode from North American sources in the entire record.
Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
To the betrayers, liars and the thieves; your fate will be waiting in the dark of night, burrowing like a snake. And it will come for you when you least expect it. It always comes when you least expect it.” ~NSS
Nicholas Sansbury Smith (The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles #1))
Microbes make up 80 percent of all biomass, says microbiologist Carl Woese. In one-fifth of a teaspoon of seawater, there are a million bacteria (and 10 million viruses), Craig Venter says, adding, “If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet. This is the planet of the bacteria
John Brockman (This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking)
One night on the roof of Amen, tending to the fire that we kept going in a scavenged washing machine drum, I asked Keller why he chose bugs and not God. He laughed, shook his head, brushed ash from his hands, scratched the beard growing in on his soft jawline. 'I have everything of the infinite in insects, Nonie. Do you know how many there are?' 'No. How many?' 'Nine hundred thousand kinds named, little warrior, maybe thirty million unidentified...we thought there were maybe ten quintillion individual insects alive on the planet. With this weather, even factoring in the extinctions, I'm sure there are lots more than that'. He laughed. 'Largest biomass there is on the Earth'.
Eiren Caffall (All the Water in the World)
Pound for pound, these animals don’t add up to much. Dog fanciers with a couple of Rottweilers trump us in terms of sheer biomass. But, when it comes to sheer insistence, even the largest, most unruly dogs—or for that matter, your average herd of cattle—are no match for our ducks, geese, parrots, parakeets, turkeys, cats, rabbits, and other birds.
Bob Tarte (Enslaved by Ducks)
Don’t be controlled by the tradition of men
Sunday Adelaja
Representatives of the Copernicus, still the most respected global authority on all things alien, held press conferences, and individual nations did the same. Scientific and governmental authorities everywhere tried to calm nerves and avert panic. Each described experiments showing the nanites were harmless—that a person could ingest them all day, could bathe in them, without any adverse effects—and insisted that that they would reach a population equilibrium as did all organisms. They called on microbiologists to hit the airwaves, reminding people that humanity had always shared the planet with microbes, which were the dominant form of life on Earth in terms of biomass, and had been for ages, despite being invisible.
Douglas E. Richards (Amped)
By far the largest single organisms that ever lived are plants, and an impressive percentage of the world’s biomass is locked up in plants. [...] The surface of the land is green because of plants, and the surface of the sea would be green too if its floating carpet of photosynthesisers were macroscopic plants instead of microorganisms too small to reflect noticeable quantities of green light. It is as though plants are going out of their way to cover every square centimetre with green, leaving none uncovered. And that is pretty much what they are doing […] From a plant’s point of view, a square centimetre of the Earth’s surface that is anything but green amounts to a negligently wasted opportunity to sweep up photons.
Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution)
Research to date suggests silvopasture far outpaces any grassland technique. That is because silvopastoral systems sequester carbon in both the biomass aboveground and the soil below. Pastures that are strewn or crisscrossed with trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless. Moreover, because the livestock yield on a silvopasture plot is higher
Paul Hawken (Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming)
rotten fruits and vegetables n. distressed produce sewage plant n. wastewater conveyance facility sewage sludge n. 1. regulated organic ingredients 2. bioslurp 3. organic biomass Some people may call the residue of treated sewage "sludge," but to John Gonzales of the Reno-Sparks, Nevada, sewage treatment plant it's "organic biomass." 4. biosolids It might look like sludge to you, but others call it "biosolids." 5. regulated wastewater residuals
William D. Lutz (Doublespeak Defined: Cut Through the Bull**** and Get the Point!)
The total combined weight of all living humans currently on Earth is around three hundred and eighty-five million tons. That is the so-called biomass of our species. The biomass of our livestock—sheep, chickens, cows, and so on—is around eight hundred million tons. And the combined biomass of every other mammal and bird on Earth is less than one hundred million tons. All the whales and tigers and monkeys and deer and bears and, yes, even Canada geese—together, they weigh less than a third of what we weigh.
John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet)
When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land.” Wilson meant wild animals. He omitted consideration of livestock, such as the domestic cow ( Bos taurus ), of which the present global population is about 1.3 billion. We are therefore only five times as numerous as our cattle (and probably less massive in total, since they’re each considerably bigger than a human). But of course they wouldn’t exist in such excess without us. A trillion pounds of cows, fattening in feedlots and grazing on landscapes that formerly supported wild herbivores, are just another form of human impact. They’re a proxy measure of our appetites, and we are hungry. We are prodigious, we are unprecedented. We are phenomenal. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
There are many religions in society but society itself is the super-religion. It says, "You are a nobody. All your life you have to try and become somebody. You are a pathetic bio-mass. You have no divine existence." Surprisingly, everybody follows this crazy super-religion.
Shunya
The killing of mature members of any species leads to a reduction not only in biomass and species density and diversity but also in that species’ accumulated knowledge of how to most efficiently fill its ecological niche and interact with the rest of the ecosystem around it. The accumulated wisdom of the species is severely reduced or, sometimes, even lost in the process. Thus the tremendous loss of human languages around the globe that were generated out of thousands of generations of human interaction with specific habitats by unique groups and which encode unique understandings of ecosystem functioning is a tragedy greater than we yet know.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients.
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
Enviva used impact quantification in its introduction and later under its climate change theme. It makes the point that it has avoided the release of 31 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions since its inception and equates them to four equivalent metrics. 3.5 billion gallons of gasoline not consumed. 34.5 billion pounds of coal not burned. 72.4 million barrels of oil not consumed. 5.3 million homes not using electricity for one year. This use of impacts is part of the straight line it draws from the 16 million metric tons of coal displaced to the avoided emissions and the equivalent measures. All of this illustrates its role in providing biomass to help customers reduce their carbon footprint.
Paul Pierroz (The Purpose-Driven Marketing Handbook: How to Discover Your Impact and Communicate Your Business Sustainability Story to Grow Sales, Retain Talent, and Attract Investors)
Biologists have always known that CO2 is essential for plant growth, and of course without plants there would be very little animal life, and no human life, on the planet. The climate alarmists have done their best to obscure this basic scientific truth by insisting on describing carbon emissions as ‘pollution’—which, whether or not they warm the planet, they most certainly are not—and deliberately mislabelling forms of energy which produce these emissions as ‘dirty’. In the same way, they like to label renewable energy as ‘clean’, seemingly oblivious to the fact that by far the largest source of renewable energy in the world today is biomass, and in particular the burning of dung, which is the major source of indoor pollution in the developing world and is reckoned to cause at least a million deaths a year.
Alan Moran (Climate Change: The Facts)
People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth- some twenty-seven million square miles- and indirectly half of what remains. We have dammed or diverted most of the world's major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do. We now routinely cause earthquakes. In terms of sheer biomass, the numbers are stark-staring: today people outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of more than eight to one. Add in the weight of our domesticated animals- mostly cows and pigs- and that ratio climbs to twenty-two to one... We have become the major driver of extinction and also, probably, of speciation. So pervasive is man's impact, it is said that we live in a new geological epoch- the Anthropocene.
Elizabeth Kolbert (Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future)
The lumbering bagos and topheavy four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black motorcycle. All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that fourwheel- drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
A few years ago some geologists sifted through the data [and] estimated that the amount of sand, soil and rock we humans mine and quarry and dredge each year is some 24 times greater than the amount of sediment moved each year by Earth’s natural erosive processes, which is to say rivers grinding away sand and sending it down towards the sea. Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955. Or – another way of looking at it – by 2020 the total weight of human-made products, from iron to concrete and everything else besides, was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet.
Ed Conway (Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization)
Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general sense than you can possibly imagine." "Huh?" "It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't know it was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow-movies, news reports - - you know." "So you're creating your own news event to make money off the information flow that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off on a bizarre tangent. "Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean." "I've heard the expression, yes." "That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a virus, you know -- it's a piece of information -- data -- that spreads from one person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel... "Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down there give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and exotic things beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the function of the Raft. It's just a big old krill carrier." Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L. Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy. "That's disgusting. I can't believe you can think about people that way." "Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It's just a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
EARTH, which is life giving—so respect its boundaries Far from floating against a white background, the economy exists within the biosphere—that delicate living zone of Earth’s land, waters and atmosphere. And it continually draws in energy and matter from Earth’s materials and living systems, while expelling waste heat and matter back out into it. Everything that is produced—from clay bricks to Lego blocks, websites to construction sites, liver pâté to patio furniture, single cream to double glazing—depends upon this throughflow of energy and matter, from biomass and fossil fuels to metal ores and minerals. None of this is news. But if the economy is so evidently embedded in the biosphere, how has economics so blatantly ignored
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
Water. Drinking water, water purification system (or tablets), and a water bottle or canteen. Food. Anything that is long lasting, lightweight, and nutritious such as protein bars, dehydrated meals, MREs24, certain canned goods, rice, and beans. Clothing. Assure it’s appropriate to a wide range of temperatures and environments, including gloves, raingear, and multiple layers that can be taken on or off as needed. Shelter. This may include a tarp or tent, sleeping bag or survival blanket, and ground pad or yoga mat. A camper or trailer is a fantastic, portable shelter, with many of the comforts of home. If you own one keep it stocked with supplies to facilitate leaving in a hurry, as it can take several hours load up and move out if you’re not ready. In certain circumstances that might mean having to leave it behind. Heat source. Lighter or other reliable ignition source (e.g., magnesium striker), tinder, and waterproof storage. Include a rocket stove or biomass burner if possible, they’re inexpensive, take very little fuel, and incredibly useful in an emergency. Self-defense/hunting gear. Firearm(s) and ammunition, fishing gear, multi-tool/knife, maps, and compass, and GPS (it’s not a good idea to rely solely on a GPS as you may find yourself operating without a battery or charger). First aid. First aid kit, first aid book, insect repellant, suntan lotion, and any needed medicines you have been prescribed. If possible add potassium iodide (for radiation emergencies) and antibiotics (for bio attacks) to your kit. Hygiene. Hand soap, sanitizer, toilet paper, towel, toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, and garbage bags. Tools. Hatchet (preferably) or machete, can opener, cooking tools (e.g., portable stove, pot, frying pan, utensils, and fuel), rope, duct tape, sunglasses, rubber tubing, and sewing kit. Lighting and communications. LED headlamp, glow sticks, candles, cell phone, charger (preferably hand crank or solar), emergency radio (preferably with hand crank that covers AM, FM, and Marine frequencies) and extra batteries, writing implements, and paper. Cash or barter. You never know how long an emergency will last. Extensive power outages mean no cash machines, so keep a few hundred dollars in small bills, gold or silver coins, or other valuables on hand.
Kris Wilder (The Big Bloody Book of Violence: The Smart Person's Guide for Surviving Dangerous Times: What Every Person Must Know About Self-Defense)
Natural ecosystems self-organize with an increase of species richness, size and age of organisms, biomass, productivity, efficiency in the recycling of organic matter, three-dimensional structure created by living organisms, and stability, among many other properties.
Enric Sala (The Nature of Nature: Why We Need The Wild)
India has struggled with the inadequacy of modern energy for a long time. Noncommercial energy commonly known as “biomass”—wood and agricultural and animal waste—has been the fuel for more than half of India’s population. In terms of commercial energy, India depends on coal for over half of its total energy, and almost 75 percent of electricity.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
Indians are still making terra preta in this way, according to Hecht, the UCLA geographer. Hecht spent years with the Kayapó, in central Amazonia, watching them create “low-biomass” fires “cool enough to walk through” of pulled-up weeds, cooking waste, crop debris, palm fronds, and termite mounds. Burning, she wrote, is constant: “To live among the Kayapó is to live in a place where parts of the landscape smolder.
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
Indeed, microbes make up 80 percent of Earth’s total biomass, says famed microbial taxonomist Carl Woese.
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
Agriculture is particularly wasteful: Palm and coconut oil plantations discard ninety-five percent of the total biomass produced. Sugar plantations discard eighty-three percent.
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
The researchers looked at about 700,000 trees on every continent around the world. The surprising result: the older the tree, the more quickly it grows. Trees with trunks 3 feet in diameter generated three times as much biomass as trees that were only half as wide.42 So, in the case of trees, being old doesn’t mean being weak, bowed, and fragile. Quite the opposite, it means being full of energy and highly productive. This means elders are markedly more productive than young whippersnappers, and when it comes to climate change, they are important allies for human beings. Since the publication of this study, the exhortation to rejuvenate forests to revitalize them should at the very least be flagged as
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World)
There were half as many wild animals (vertebrates) alive in 2014 as there were 40 years earlier, and today’s extinction rate is about 1,000 times higher than the background rate. Humans and livestock account for over 97% of land vertebrate biomass, whereas wild animals account for less than 3%. We have essentially replaced the Earth’s wild places with agriculture, the Earth’s nonhumans with humans.
Peter Kalmus (Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution)
Your kind cling to your flesh as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved. For the machine is immortal.
Ben Counter
Odd that you mention new words.' The Doctor's face was red now, capillaries swelling under the biomass probes of the stone. 'Gallifreyan's always been a static language, hasn't it? We go out into the universe and talk to everyone, but we don't take loan words back into our own tongue. TARDISes translate everything for us, or time rings, or things like your locket there. We don't have to integrate our experiences into words: they do it for us.' A vein in his neck began to pulsate, and next to it a warm glow spread through the blackness of the stone as if it were pleased.
Simon Bucher-Jones (Doctor Who: The Taking of Planet 5)
The grasping fingers of the gravity well reached for him.
William C. Tracy (Of Mycelium and Men (The Biomass Conflux, #1))
The original timeline for finishing the colony was ten years, but that was when we thought we would have materials, and didn’t account for the homicidal fugus outside our gates.
William C. Tracy (Of Mycelium and Men (The Biomass Conflux, #1))
Which can mean well meanings include: “Pardon me, you’re hanging from my rubber ring, thank you so very much”, “It may be just vital biomass oxygenating the planet to you, but it’s home to me” and “I’m sure there was a rain forest around here a moment ago
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch, #2))
generally having an address on the Labour Block. There are things out in the wilds that will kill you so they can experiment with just how indigestible Earth biomass is, but honestly that’s a marginal cause of death. On that first day virtually nothing tried to eat me at all. I felt almost rejected. But on Kiln you need to sweat the little things, the microscopic elements. Once Kiln gets into you… well, we’ve all seen the example tank. I’d noted to Primatt, before, that you weren’t keeping the camp clean if you didn’t scrub Excursions down every time. And then, not being on Excursions right then, promptly forgot all about it. And now I’m the newest Excursionista and about to get the final object lesson in my current crash course in the Use of Carrots and Sticks in the Extrasolar Carceral Programme. On returning, I expect us to be stopped at the gate but they just let us in. There’s no airlock, no gas chamber, as the Excursionistas refer to decontamination. We just… walk straight in. I actually then expect a firing squad because this seems the only plausible alternative, and even that’s unhygienic. Gas us, then shoot us, surely. Except we go into the Labour Block and get right on with dismantling the tables and turning them into our bunks. Our bunks which are now all down one end of the Block, with everyone else keeping their distance. I discover that I, subcommittee man as I am, have missed a whole underground conspiracy that’s been going on behind my back. Sure, I’d noted before that Keev and the Excursions crew all bunked together. But then they all worked together. I’d guessed it was by choice. And sure, I’d been given a quick spritz with the decontaminator every week or so, even though I’d never been near a piece of Kiln biology that hadn’t been thoroughly prepared for the scalpel rig, but that seemed just good practice on a world like Kiln. It was good practice. But here we were in Excursions, having come back from a day out in the woods wearing paper suits, and nobody has sprayed us down. I timorously raise this with Keev and he looks like he wants to thump me. “You get decontaminated after the third day,” he tells me. “Full heavy gassing. You’ll love it. Not the light mist of piss everyone else gets.” “That’s mad,” I protest. “Costs saving, they say,” Keev explains. I pick up on his tone and expression, the whole thousand-yard stare of him. He is, after all, a man who has been on Excursions for years, measured out in those three-
Adrian Tchaikovsky (Alien Clay)
the emergence of some very large organisms has done nothing to diminish the ubiquity and importance of microbes: the biosphere is a highly symbiotic system based on the abundance and variety of microbial biomass, and it could not operate and endure without its foundation of microorganisms.
Vaclav Smil (Size: How It Explains the World)
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
The bio-mass of the earth is about 600 million tons, and the planet doesn't care if it's humans or compost.
D. Michael Popppe
You are the ONLY you there is, you have a purpose, you are not just a biomass
Sunday Adelaja
You are not a biomass, you were not born only to be like a bush or tree, just to marry, reproduce and die
Sunday Adelaja
You are far more than a biomass
Sunday Adelaja
When a human being is brought up with the concern of simply taking care of his body and the external aspect of his life, he is acting as though he is only biomass
Sunday Adelaja
Until we begin to discover and create value, purposefully and systemically, we are not humans but only biomass
Sunday Adelaja
Human being living at the level of biomass will comply with the changing fashion and beauty standards
Sunday Adelaja
The strategy was to frame energy as the heart of the economy while destroying environmentalism in the process. Here is how the strategy was carried out in the first months of the administration. • Put pro-business, pro-energy-development people in charge of the most environmentally sensitive agencies: the Interior Department (Gale Norton) and the EPA (Christie Whitman). • Cut funds for research and development on conservation (e.g., fuel economy, which would vastly lessen the need for oil) and environmentally responsible energy sources (biomass, wind, solar, and so on). • Announce a national energy supply crisis and call it a matter of national security. Develop a plan to respond to the “crisis.” • Frame the “crisis” so that environmentalists are defined as the problem: their regulations impede the development of supply. • Appoint commissioners to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) who would refuse to cap electricity prices overall, even though FERC’s mission is to guarantee reasonable energy prices. The
George Lakoff (Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think)
Human being living at the level of biomass will comply with all standards and patterns that are required by the surroundings and society
Sunday Adelaja
A biomass will do whatever it takes to be accepted by the society
Sunday Adelaja
A biomass will live with a self-preservation instinct
Sunday Adelaja
A ‘biomass’ man lives by his instincts
Sunday Adelaja
A ‘biomass’ man tries to look good on the outside but inside he is afraid of himself
Sunday Adelaja
A ‘biomass’ man reaction comes from reflexes and instinct
Sunday Adelaja
A ‘biomass’ man does not use logical and analytical thinking
Sunday Adelaja
A ‘biomass’ man is not deeply analyzing things to draw a meaningful conclusions
Sunday Adelaja
A ‘biomass’ man repeats what he sees
Sunday Adelaja
It’s time to put aside the search for economic laws demonstrating that growing national output will eventually deliver ecological health. Economics, it turns out, is not a matter of discovering laws: it is essentially a question of design. And the reason why even the world’s richest countries are still making us all feel the burn is because the last two hundred years of industrial activity have been based upon a linear industrial system whose design is inherently degenerative. The essence of that industrial system is the cradle-to-grave manufacturing supply chain of take, make, use, lose: extract Earth’s minerals, metals, biomass and fossil fuels; manufacture them into products; sell those on to consumers who – probably sooner rather than later – will throw them ‘away’. When drawn in its simplest form, it looks something like an industrial caterpillar, ingesting food at one end, chewing it through, and excreting the waste out of the other end. This
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
You’ve probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
Few coffee drinkers realise how little of the biomass generated at a coffee farm is consumed,or the wastefulness associated with their consumption habits.
Gunter Pauli
Oh,” he said, stopping in the doorway. “I should probably warn you. Your beds might take a little getting used to.” “Why?” Tesla asked. “What’s wrong with them?” When Uncle Newt had shown them their room earlier, the beds had looked normal enough. Not that Nick and Tesla had paid much attention to them. They’d been distracted—and horrified—by the posters haphazardly stapled to the wall: Teletubbies, Elmo, Smurfs, Albert Einstein, and the periodic table. (Nick and Tesla had quickly agreed that the first three would “fall down” and “accidentally” “get ripped” at the first opportunity.) “There’s nothing wrong with your beds, and everything right!” Uncle Newt declared. “I’m telling you, kids. You haven’t slept till you’ve slept on compost!” “What?” Nick and Tesla said together. Even Uncle Newt couldn’t miss the disgust on their faces. “Maybe I’d better come up and explain,” he said. Uncle Newt pulled the comforter off Nick’s bed and revealed something that didn’t look like a bed at all. It was more like a lumpy black sleeping bag with tubes and wires poking out of one end. “Behold!” Uncle Newt said. “The biomass thermal conversion station!” Nick reluctantly gave it a test-sit. It felt like he was lowering himself onto a garbage bag stuffed with rotten old food. Because he was. “As you sleep,” Uncle Newt explained, “your body heat will help decompose food scraps pumped into the unit, which will in turn produce more heat that the convertor will turn into electricity. So, by the time you wake up in the morning, you’ll have enough power to—ta da!” Uncle Newt waved his hands at a coffeemaker sitting on the floor nearby. “Brew coffee?” Tesla said. Uncle Newt gave her a gleeful nod. “We don’t drink coffee,” said Nick. “Then you can have a hot cup of invigorating fresh-brewed water.” “Great,” Nick said. He experimented with a little bounce on his “bed.” He could feel slimy things squishing and squashing beneath his butt. “Comfy?” Uncle Newt asked. “Uhh … kind of,” Nick said. Uncle Newt beamed at his invention. “Patent pending,” he said. Uncle Newt was a gangly man with graying hair, but at that moment he looked like a five-year-old thinking about Christmas. Tesla gave the room a tentative sniff. “Shouldn’t the compost stink?” “Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Each biomass thermal conversion station is completely airtight!” Uncle Newt’s smile wavered just the teeniest bit. “In theory.” Nick opened his mouth to ask another question, but Uncle Newt didn’t seem to notice. “Well,” he said, slapping his hands together, “I guess you two should wash your teeth and brush your faces and all that. Good night!
Bob Pflugfelder (Nick and Tesla and the High-Voltage Danger Lab: A Mystery with Gadgets You Can Build Yourself ourself)
The combined biomass of all domesticated animals is now some twenty-five times that of all remaining wild terrestrial mammals. Some of our favored plants have become among the most widely propagated on the planet. Wheat, rice, coffee, and cannabis, to name a few, have gone worldwide by giving us what we want. You have to wonder who has been using whom, because in terms of evolutionary success, these plants have done well by us 7—others, not so much. Through our reworking of landscapes, especially for agriculture, we have destroyed and altered habitats and, often without realizing it, created new ones. We’ve
David Grinspoon (Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future)
It stands to reason that, until very recently, all vertebrate life on the planet was wildlife. But astoundingly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land animals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass.
Peter Brannen (The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions)
Metabolic networks remain the only class of biological network reconstructed reasonably comprehensively at the genome-scale in humans. Given that metabolic networks are ultimately based on directed chemical reactions that obey the laws of mass and energy balance, they can further serve the basis for calculations to predict reaction rates (metabolic flux). These fluxes can subsequently be used to compute productions and growth rates of metabolites. In flux balance analysis, the set of reactions is formulated as a stochiometric matrix, which enumerates the ratios of metabolite participation in each reaction. A set of physically possible reaction flux rates result by enforcing a steady-state mass balance (homeostasis) and additional constraints on reaction reversabilities and maximal conversion rates. From within the space of chemically feasible reaction flux combinations, the subset of biologically relevant reaction flux profiles can be solved by optimizing an objective function. The most commonly used objective function in microbes has been to maximize the production of biomass, which serves as a proxy for maximizing growth rate. Notably, while maximal growth may be an appropriate assumption for diseases such as cancer under certain conditions, the best cellular objective function to simulate many human tissues and cell types is unknown (and is likely condition-specific). Adjusting this objective function, which was developed based on microbial physiology, to better reflect human tissues is an area of active research.
Joseph Loscalzo (Network Medicine: Complex Systems in Human Disease and Therapeutics)
Gravity tends to pull fertility downhill. Hence fertile valleys and infertile hilltops. But wait, many times the most fertile soils are on hilltops. How could that be? Herbivores graze in the fertile valleys and then trudge up to the hilltops to chew their cuds and lounge. Why the hilltop? To watch for those nasty predators. The herbivore-grass, predator-prey relationships are foundational to moving those biomass-stored sunbeams around on the landscape. Without animals, the anti-gravitational movement would be impossible. Without the predator, it wouldn't be incentivized. Truly, this whole ecosystem is fearfully and wonderfully made.
Joel Salatin (The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation)
We also need to increase the forest cover from 20 per cent to 40 per cent by 2020 as well as enrich the environment through mandatory zero liquid discharge and zero effluent discharge system policies for industrial waste, encourage power generation from biomass and municipal waste at city corporations and village municipalities and create 200,000 carbon-neutral village panchayats before 2020.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
Ten thousand years ago, humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; we now account for 98%.
Daniel J. Levitin (The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload)
Africa, in particular, has barely begun to exploit its renewable energy potential. Energy analysts say that solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass sources could more than supply the energy needs of every continent. The key is providing a favorable playing field, and that means financial aid, technology transfer, and training programs to assist developing nations, like the ones being advanced by the EU/AU partnership.
Jeremy Rifkin (The The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World)
Microbes are invisible to our naked eye, with a few exceptions that reinforce the rule. Millions can fit into the eye of a needle. But if you were to gather them all up, not only would they outnumber all the mice, whales, humans, birds, insects, worms, and trees combined—indeed all of the visible life-forms we are familiar with on Earth—they would outweigh them as well. Think about that for a moment. Invisible microbes comprise the sheer bulk of the Earth’s biomass, more than the mammals and reptiles, all the fish in the sea, the forests.
Martin J. Blaser (Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues)
With his ardent passion for energy and ability to make the most out of little, Tulga Demir has successfully entered the renewable energy industry through biomass gasification, combined heat and power, and waste-to- energy power solutions
Tulga Demir
When God says he doesn't see a man, the logical question would be to ask, what then does he see? In my thinking, I believe the word that best describes what God sees in the absence of a man is a bunch of flesh – biological masses. There is a word that might best fit the description of what God sees when he looks at the earth, the word is BIOMASS or BIOMASSES.
Sunday Adelaja
Biomasses are a biological reality that cannot be denied as existing, but even though they exist physically, yet they have not attained the height of Homo sapiens
Sunday Adelaja
Humans could be termed as biomasses when they don’t fully put into use their human qualifications.
Sunday Adelaja
Men and women that don’t bother to think are just biomasses.
Sunday Adelaja
Men and women that don’t bother to notice things that are out of order are considered biomasses in God's sight.
Sunday Adelaja
Men and women that don’t respond with solution to the challenges of the era are human biomasses.
Sunday Adelaja
Even God does not call every human a man. There are some who have not managed to attain the height of those who God refers to as men. They might be giving birth, eating and drinking, having fun, but yet, when they don’t live for what they were created for, they remain biomasses.
Sunday Adelaja
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.” —William S. Burroughs
Nicholas Sansbury Smith (The Biomass Revolution (The Tisaian Chronicles #1))
There is another way of taking energy out of biomass that leaves you with something storable: burn the wood into a form of charcoal that can then be used as a soil additive. This ‘biochar’ approach may work well in some places as a way of producing energy, storing carbon and improving the soil, but like other forms of soil management and local enhancement of the biosphere, it is very hard to see it being used for hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon a year, let alone for billions.
Oliver Morton (The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World)
One feature of succession true of many different environments is a difference in resource use between earlier and later seres. Species characteristic of earlier seral stages tend to maximize control of resources and production of biomass, even at the cost of inefficiency; thus, such species tend to maximize production and distribution of offspring even when this means the great majority of offspring fail to reach reproductive maturity. Species typical of later seres, by contrast, tend to maximize the efficiency of their resource use, even at the cost of limits to biomass production and the distribution of individual organisms; thus, these species tend to maximize energy investment in individual offspring even when this means that offspring are few and the species fails to occupy all available niche spaces. Species of the first type, termed “R-selected” species in the ecological literature, have specialized to flourish opportunistically in disturbed environments, while those of the second type, or “K-selected” species, have specialized to form stable biotic communities that change only with shifts in the broader environment.
John Michael Greer (The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age)
All the world she needs is here, under this canopy—the densest biomass anywhere on Earth. Steep, steely streams scour through rickles of rock where salmon spawn—water cold enough to kill all pain. Falls flash over ridges turned jade by moss and tumbled with shed branches. In the scattered openings, shot here and there through the understory, sit secret congregations of salmonberry, elderberry, huckleberry, snowberry, devil’s club, ocean spray, and kinnikinnick. Great straight conifer monoliths fifteen stories high and a car-length thick hold a roof above all. The air around her resounds with the noise of life getting on with it. Cheebee of invisible winter wrens. Industrial pock from jackhammering woodpeckers. Warbler buzz. Thrush flutter. The scatterings of beeping grouse across the forest floor. At night, the cool hoot of owls chills her blood. And, always, the tree frogs’ song of eternity.
Richard Powers (The Overstory)
The essence of that industrial system is the cradle-to-grave manufacturing supply chain of take, make, use, lose: extract Earth’s minerals, metals, biomass and fossil fuels; manufacture them into products; sell those on to consumers who—probably sooner rather than later—will throw them ‘away’.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
Biomass, which basically is a fancy-sounding name for wood, is one of the old, reliable renewables that can produce energy when it is needed. The problem for the planet is that wood is often imported from US forests in diesel-driven ships, and emits MORE carbon dioxide than even coal when it is burned. Biomass is categorized by the EU only as carbon dioxide free because it is hoped that felled trees will be replanted and over many future decades will soak up as much carbon dioxide as was released by its burning. Needless to say, this is dubious accounting at best.” -p. 108
Bjørn Lomborg
Even today, we humans account for 350 million tons of biomass on this planet. That’s three times the biomass of all the sheep, chickens, whales, and elephants—combined. This planet has become an ecology almost completely dedicated to fueling our massive calorie-hogging brains.
A.G. Riddle (Genome (The Extinction Files, #2))