RESOURCE EXTENSION

by David Nuttle

Resources of all types have are in short and shorter supply. It is more critical than ever to extend resources by multiple uses. A good example is the multiple benefits form dollars we

expend for counter-desertification efforts being undertaken by NPI and others.

Funds expended for counter-desertification help produce food crops to improve our global food security and green energy availability while developing water resources, improving our environment, and achieving massive carbon sequestration to help slow global warming. As an added benefit, the biochar added to sands to make them productive provides long-term fertility to increase crop yields.

Another good example of resource extension is the civic action programs used by military units and law enforcement to assist villagers under an array of armed attacks by criminals, terrorists, narco-terrorists, insurgent or others. By providing such assistance, rapport with villagers achieved and villagers start to warn their new friends of pending armed attacks to help keep them safe. Villagers thus have more and more of their basic needs met & nations having civic action programs receive a boost in economic development. N. B. NPI provides

training and support programs for civic action.

Clearing national forests of insect-killed timber facilitates forest restoration, reduces the fire hazards in these forests, an provides commercial and export market based on biochar made from this dead timber. By providing the world's smallholder farmers with quality biochar, as a farmland soil additive, soil microbes in the biochar provide all needed plant nutrients, long-term, so purchase of expensive commercial fertilizers is no longer needed.

Since smallholder farmers produce most of the world's food crops, the use of biochar will dramatically increase crop yields to reduce global food insecurity.

The idea is to be creative, in all ways possible, to get the most "bang-for-the-buck."