Jeff, terrific stuff here.   Don't forget the important work and lessons learned from Sandor Katz, fermentation guru and his associates.

He would be the ideal thought leader and advisor for the advancement and advocacy of this work, in creating value-added vegetation models that uplift the underprivileged and create viable vocational opportunities for all stakeholders of our communities, NEO-wide.

I am proud of you and Jenita and the great work you are doing with local networks, Ning or otherwise.  Kudos.

Remember that it is the sound integration of all this in parallel virtual and physical planes that will truly drive regional transformation. More on this soon.

Great! Let me kick them into gear again, then I'm happy to facilitate colonization...

I hear that crushed up eggshells will help neutralize all those coffee grounds.

Don't we have more important things to worry about [than zebra mussels], like maybe the Mercury coming from the coal burning power plants?

I'd bet that that mercury in our lakes is more devastating than zebra mussels, but I really don't know.

((By the way... beautiful example of REALNEO style, Peter: take a comment about one subject, respond to it by bringing up a tangentially related issue you're more interested in, then argue vigorously enough about the tangent to bring it to the forefront of the discussion.))

Anyway, I don't know, and they don't know, and we don't know...

The point is that we don't know...

We know that nature has been --( over a relatively long period of time and as a whole )-- quite robust, but we also know that we now have the ability to affect it profoundly, in relation to individual components (species, systems...) and as a whole (say, climate and atmosphere.)

We know that it's all interconnected, and that a change to one system without fail leads to a change in another. As for drastic changes... I think we've been pretty lucky lately.

We only have guesses as to what the results of change will be; we don't have a nearly complete enough picture to understand or gauge effects on a large scale.

In general, nobody knows with absoluteness whether the introduction of a new species [to an area where it thrives at the extreme expense of others] is less or more important than minding our chemical business. In either case, we're throwing a system out of whack, and we ought to think hard about whether it's possible to pull it back to where it was -- whether or not we can see all of the ill effects.

That's why it's called conservation.
We should largely be in maintenance mode until we understand the system better.

"Ecological concerns such as biotic homogenization aside, the economic toll [of doing absolutely nothing about invasive species] would be disastrous. The economic harm caused by the 50,000 non-native invasive plants, animals, and other organisms already in the United States is approaching $140 billion per year. Florida's government alone spends $45 million annually battling invasive species, which cause some $180 million in agricultural damage."

And $180 million annually is a small price tag compared to what those in the developing world are facing thanks to the introduction "exotic plants" and the resulting damage to the Earth's biodiversity: According to Hope Shand of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, the poor rely on that biodiversity for "85 to 90% of their livelihood needs." And crop genetic resources "are disappearing at 1-2% per annum." Yes, tell us again how environmental "narrowmindedness" is suffocating us.

-- Why Worry About Invasive Species? — By Bradford Plumer, Mother Jones