Prosperity for Rhode Island

Compost and the future of Rhode Island by Greg Gerritt

Everyone likes to eat, and all of us need good nutritious food.  But if you live in Rhode Island and are used to getting all your food at the supermarket, you might want to give a second thought to where your food comes from.  

Global warming is threatening agriculture, threatening sources of irrigation water, around the world, including California, the source of much of Rhode Island’s food.  Transporting food from distant places makes global warming worse. That says we need to grow more food in Rhode Island.

If we are to grow more food locally, the first thing to do is take very good care of the soil.  In fact if you take good care of the soil, enrich it, feed it, build its texture, you can grow almost anything in abundance.  The best thing to feed soil is compost, and the only way to create compost is to stop throwing things we could compost into the trash.  

More and more places around the country and around the world are doing this.  San Francisco uses a three bin system to collect all the compostables in the city.  Some cities have gone to bicycle powered low tech compost collection systems.  Some communities have begun by collecting restaurant and school food waste as a place to start that is easier than setting up a home collection and separation system, and can make the biggest dent easiest in the amount of compostables throw away.  

None of us know what is really the best system for Rhode Island.  Maybe it is a combination of best practices found throughout the country.  But we need to develop something that is easy, efficient, comprehensive, and affordable so that we can get all the compostables out of the trash stream and into the compost stream.

If you can help contact Greg Gerritt at 401-331-0529 or gerritt@mindspring.com 

One of the things I have learned over the years is how to figure out why people chose one place over another for settling.  There is an element of randomness and willfulness in where people choose to build cities, but most often they are located based on natural resources and configurations.  Being able to read this and figure it out for each place you are helps you figure out how to help a community develop  intelligently.  What triggered this today was watching two kingfishers fuss and call today unlike I had ever seen them do.  Kingfishers chase other kingfishers away, where as no one was leaving today, so maybe it was more that spring was in the air. A person coming up on the birds without any previous contact might guess right or wrong or have no idea, whereas I am not sure what I saw, I both know how I could find out, and can at least report it was like no other kingfisher conversation I have ever witnessed.  

When i go to a city, one of the first things i do is try to figure out why a city was located where it is.  I had always known that in Maine the larger the waterfall, the bigger the mill complex/city on the inland rivers.  Providence is a pretty obvious place 2 small rivers with waterpower flowing into a pretty protected harbor, even if it needed dredging.  In 19th Century terms it was a natural for industrial powerhouse.  And the area all around the head of the bay and up into Mt Hope Bay is pretty much the same way.  

In recent years a few trips I took gave me an opportunity to test my insights/knowledge based on observations.  Reading PA, Chicago, and Milwaukee all demonstrated how the relationship to the water, both as a port and as a power generator effected their history.  Milwaukee, with two rivers flowing into downtown and joining just before entering Lake Michigan is remarkably similar to Providence in layout and industrial history, substituting Narragansett Bay for Lake Michigan and the different mix in industries that evolved using the ore deposits’ and agricultural bounty of the Great Lakes and Milwaukee’s growth after New England had moved the US beyond the textile beginnings of the industrial revolution.  

Chicago was founded as a city based on its place as the Great Lakes port closest to the Mississippi watershed and therefore the obvious transshipment place. Almost the crossroads of the continent.  I did not know that when I arrived there, but with much of my walking along the lake directed towards finding out why Chicago was a big city there, it turned out to be a not very difficult mission to figure it out.