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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Vilsack Highlights role of agriculture

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Vilsack Highlights role of agriculture
  • Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:54:56 -0600


Three things. I'm counting the energy problem as one thing helped by sustainable agriculture, due to the enormous waste of energy by centralized, industrial food production. But shelter? Not related to food production. How much is transportation affected by sustainable, local food?
paul tradingpost@lobo.net

Transportation and shelter are built in order to accommodate the need of being in one place or another.
If you have locally self-sufficient food and farms (and supporting skilled and unskilled trades), then people don't have to go anywhere to survive and even thrive. Houses are built where it is valuable for them to be. In a fossil fuel world, McMansions could be valuable as a 'trophy', and placed anywhere that one could reach with cheap gasoline. The value of a house in a localized economy is to provide a place close to where people are working and where they get their food. If they work to grow food, they need to be nearby.
(Location!, location!, location!). The idea of a 'real estate market' only came about after the automobile became commonplace. Before that, a home was a place to live and stay there, close to a source of sustenance or income, not a place to drive to or 'flip'.
Once people reached a livable place, they didn't need wagon trains anymore. The railroads were built by eastern business interests trying to get raw materials cheap and to sell finished products, not by western settlers to commute.
The real drop in real estate values has yet to come in this depression; when the value of a place is re-evaluated based on whether people need to be living in THAT place and whether they can reach that place cheaply and still earn a living or grow food, rather than based on the baubles and fixtures and swimming pools of the consumer McMansion economy.

Dan C.
Belgium, WI





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