Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

http://www.energybulletin.net/34030.html


Industrial agriculture is destined for disaster, and will leave in its wake
sterile soils and an agricultural model at a grossly inappropriate scale.
Within the next decade or so, small-scale farming will return to the center
of American life. Think of the Victory Gardens of Oil War II as a
small-scale, temporary experiment. Say goodbye to the 3,000-mile Caesar
salad to which we've become accustomed; say hello to locally grown food,
recognizing that you might have to grow your own. In the near term, this
situation presents many business and vocational opportunities for creative,
hard-working people. First, though, we will have to retrieve considerable
knowledge from the dustbin of history. And in arid regions such as Tucson,
Arizona, we'll need to obtain our water differently, too. When oil becomes
too expensive or too limited in supply, we won't be using it to suck water
from deep in the ground. In the absence of fossil fuels, the human carrying
capacity of the Tucson basin is approximately zero.

Author Guy McPherson is professor of Natural Resources and Ecology &
Evolutionary Biology at the Unversity of Arizona.