Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/Kuntsler.html
Excerpt from Interview, October 1, 2005 James Howard Kunstler, The Long
Emergency:

 And we’re also going to see a reversal of the two hundred year trend of
people moving from the country to the city, and from the small towns to the
city. I think we’re going to see people leaving the cities, and going to
the small towns and the countryside. And for this reason: the whole problem
with fossil fuels, and in particular natural gas and oil – with
agriculture – tends to suggest that we’re not going to be able to grow
food the way we’ve been doing it the last 100 years, we’re really going
to have to make other arrangements. We’re not going to be able to
continue pouring oil and natural gas based inputs onto the soil, and
producing these enormous amounts of corn, and turning them into Cheese
Doodles and Pepsi-Cola; that whole way of farming is going to be over with.
And also, the tremendous transportation issues that are associated with it:
the 3000 mile Caesar salad. You know, most of the food on our tables
travels thousands of miles, and we’ve been able to do that because oil
has been cheap, and this is coming to an end. The implication of that is
we’re probably going to have to grow more food close to home, and the
parts of the country by the way where that’s not possible are going to be
regions that find themselves in deep trouble. Some of these places are
pretty obvious: places like Phoenix, and Tucson, and Las Vegas. I think
they will be substantially depopulated. They may even be contested
territory with Mexico for a while. But ultimately, those parts of the
country will not support substantial populations of any ethnic mix, whether
it’s Americans – Anglos, Mexicans or anybody. They’re going to have
additional problems on top of their food supply problems and their fuel
problems; they’ll have additional problems with water, and with
air-conditioning. You can draw some conclusions on which parts of the
country are liable to be successful.

And there are many layers to this, but the whole business of growing our
food is really going to come much closer to the center of American life, I
think. And I think we will see much larger numbers of people becoming
involved and becoming employed with agriculture in one way or another, or
the value added activities associated with it.