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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Vilsack Highlights role of agriculture
  • Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2009 19:40:59 -0700


Interesting angles on that. I'll meet you halfway on that one, Dan ... I'd
agree *most* transportation and even shelter could be managed locally, if
communities were living sustainably. However, my comments were focused just
on sustainable food rather than the whole sustainable living thing. In other
words our food production per se doesn't make necessary transportation and
shelter sustainable. And of course, many places fit for human habitation
don't have suitable building materials lying around or communities close
enough to walk or ride an animal. Small farmsteads years ago allowed a lot of
people to live close enough to use horses, mules, carriages & buckboards to
get necessities once a week or so. But many supplies that couldn't be
produced locally arrived by train or wagon caravan from hundreds of miles
away. Even blacksmiths need iron from somewhere else. I work the garden
without a tiller but the shovel was made in China. And I couldn't make a good
shovel from natural materials lying around this area.

We've lost many of the harder skills from a hundred years ago with no one to
teach us, so who knows where we'll all end up. Even so, hardship or collapse
won't be uniform across the board. Some places will get by, some won't. We
see some of that happening already. Stay out of most of California, Nevada,
Arizona, Michigan, & Florida. Detroit unemployment is 50%. It see it as
depending on location and who's in community working together and who's gone
off the cliff with the bunker mentality. And before long a lot of people will
be asking why didn't we hear about all this sooner.

For more along that line readers can try
THE CRITICAL UNRAVELING OF U.S. SOCIETY
Millions upon millions of Americans are poor, broke, struggling, starving,
desperate… and armed.
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/1429/1/


paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 12/20/2009 at 12:54 PM Dan Conine wrote:

>>
>> 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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