Ironically, I believe there are alternate energy sources that can power a car with significantly less carbon output (particularly given their comparative, er, horsepower) than a Clydesdale or a camel. Also, lower water cost. We're dealing with climate change and food shortage as well as an energy crisis, after all.

It gives the filthies a job, saves the crude and the planet and gets me where I want to go. I'm all for people powered transportation.

The camel is indeed an amazing creature, but the horse is likewise an efficient and renewable form of transportation. Feed them some of the grain grown for ethanol and you have a very sustainable form of transportation for those too lazy to ride a bike to work. Donkeys, mules and oxen have also proved themselves useful over the millenia.

Does this mean Indians are going to open used camel lots?

bringing back horses, mules and donkeys, with the exception using them to pull heavy loads. I think that's a great idea. I think also people who ride their bicycle to work on a regular basis should get a tax break.

As cheap as a horse would be though, they still need vet care, a farrier and more, so my utopian fantasy would still be expensive. Not to mention poop disposal.

In regards to another LW, there's nothing wrong with horses, particularly draft horses, pulling heavy loads. If you've ever watched a draft pull, you'll know what I mean. The horses can't wait to pull the concrete sledges!

As more and more Chinese enter the middle class ranks due to manufacturing exportation to the US, and therefore enjoying their disposable income in manners such as abandoning their bicycles and motor cycles for automobiles, the US consumer, feeling financially squeezed because of the rise of oil consumption by China, has started to abandon their automobiles for motor cycles and bikes.

The horse is ten times more dangerous than the automobile, not to mention the problem with manure. Environmentalists will tell you that cows are the bane of the planet's exitstence, they pour methane into the atmosphere, and pollute the water supply. Of course we aren't going to eat those horses, (hah!), but as mass transportation they give all these problems new meaning. The horse belongs at the racetrack, period. (Unlike Nascar people do not go to the horse races to watch the horses crash.)

Horses do put us in touch with our humanity, that's a given, but as beast of burden forget it. Camels as horses, never happen.

Our current mainstream culture has forgotten about living with and using animals. It'll be hard for most people to "see" a solution using a new fangled technology like horses or camels when they have no frame of reference to understand how you deal with them.

Horses more dangerous than cars? I don't think so looking at the sheer damage to persons and property caused by cars in general.

Manure a problem? Maybe in pickup/distribution. It's one of the cleanest manures with generally no human pathogens for grass fed animals, breaks down quickly in the garden, or can be composted very easily. Weed seeds are probably the biggest problem (and that's why they made hoes.)

Without experience, "normal" can seem very strange. Like the occasional 5th grader I run into that doesn't believe carrots grow underground in *gasp* the dirt. Animals for power shouldn't be panned because we haven't any experience. It's a systems design issue only, with a side order of cultural engineering to make it "normal."

But before we'd have to get all 'primitive', the entire sphere of appropriate technologies for smaller distributed farm operations should be explored. You can get fuel sipping walk-behind implements that allow small-scale farming which has been shown to yield 2-4 times the national average. Even the small-scale hand tool folks like Jon Jeavons are consistently growing enough nutrients and calories for a person for one year, in a temperate climate, in less than 4,000 sq. ft. or 1/10th of an acre. No chemical fertilizers, no crazy inputs, he gets 2-16 times the average yield for a crop and his top soil increases every year. And he doesn't break any backs doing it, either. But these solutions are local to any area, not ones to feed the worldwide distribution middleman machine.

Of course, making any change at all may be too 'primitive' for some. Circumstances will determine needs in the end, I suppose.

So by that math it would take every man woman and child, intensively and by hand, farming an area the size of Pennsylvania to feed us all.

Actually, that's a great idea for temperate parts of the country.

If rickshaws create too much strain on the driver's body (something I can easily imagine being the case), then bicycle taxis would work, instead. (They tend to have these in coastal tourist towns with boardwalks--one cyclist driving, "cab" part holds a couple or one person+groceries.)

One point for horses, though: will work in rain/snow/sleet.

I've read that horse manure actually locks up the nitrogen in the soil so it acts like a nute blocker rather than a source of nutes.

The most nutrient-rich shit is bat shit. Right now the bat population in the Northeast is in trouble because there's some bat disease killing them off. If that spreads to places like Mexico and Indonesia, where all the best bat shit comes from, then that will be bad for organic gardeners.

As far as camels go, my mother lived in Libya before I was born and she told me many times how much just HATED those creatures. They spit, bite and kick. Good luck to anyone who has to work with them.

Oh lordie maybe some day we'll see camel psychologists paid to help people deal with their acting out camels.

Electro Robot -

My point wasn't that we should do farming that way, only that we could. You imply that everyone would need to be involved, but the experience of permaculture and biointensive people is that they can spend an average of 1-2 hours per day to feed a person for a year. One could still hold down a job and go the lake for a weekend with numbers like those.

I just wanted to point out that some things really are possible when most people perceive it as "impossible." Imagine 40 million acres of lawn in the US (and its significant resource use) converted to something producing food and still having the basic economy we have now. It's possible. I'll not comment whether it's probable.

Silenced -

You're right - excess carbon in the soil locks up the microbes that do the work supplying the nutrients until it's reduced. (I don't really have that problem here in the tropics.) But considering that a good compost starts out at a 30:1 carbon to nitrogen ratio when it's built, horse manure is very nice for that (and compost is always a positive input.) I offered that solution for the manure because it was presented as a problem, when in fact it's a resource.

But it's important to realize that the experience of the Green Revolution has us collectively "knowing" that major additional inputs are needed to make anything grow. Nature solved the problem where no added inputs are needed a long time ago. The experience of the biointensive guys is that once established, you don't need any inputs because you grow your own inputs as part of the process. Once again, it's just possible.