[permaculture] Urban/ Rural Footprint
Laurence Gaffney
lgaffney at bigpond.com
Wed Jun 17 20:07:26 EDT 2009
The following article - Is Humanity Fatally Successful? :-
http://www.scarp.ubc.ca/rees%20Is%20Humanity%20Fatally%20Successful.pdf
is by William E Rees co-originator of the Ecological Footprint approach in which he makes the following statement:-
"What eco-footprinting shows is that, in ecological terms, the Dutch don't live in Holland. Similarly, urban dwellers don't "live"in their cities; urbanization simply separates us from the productive ecosystems that sustain us but lie far beyond the urban boundary. An apt analogy is "the city as human feedlot." Like the city, a livestock feedlot is an area with an extraordinarily high density of consumer animals and a corresponding major waste management problem. Cities and feedlots are incomplete ecosystems - the productive land component is some distance away."
As I read this I thought of Toby Hemenway's thought provoking article of 2005 entitled Peal Oil and Urban Sustainability. http://patternliteracy.com/urban.html
Laurence Gaffney
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