Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[dan conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

The defining factor as to whether a city or town is sustainable is it's 
Net Usefulness. Does the presence of the city or town add value to the 
farms and villages surrounding it? If it only consumes resources 
(imported oil, imported food, imported people, imported trinkets) and 
doesn't provide useful labor or goods above what it consumes, then you 
should get out. In other words, is there a natural demand for that 
particular concentration of bodies, or does it simply exist because of 
inertia and money? Is it a shining inspiration of cooperation or a black 
hole sucking up everything within its reach?

I used to think we should just nuke any city over 100,000 and we would 
be better off as a country. Sharon thinks 1,000,000 (She doesn't say it 
that way, but abandoning a city is equivalent to bombing it...). I think 
most on this list would agree that anything over 1000 or so is probably 
just a scam to suck value(including youth) away from the land and 
provide cannon fodder for the war mongers who think there is always 
another place to steal resources from.

I think of cities as giant barns (CHFOs..combined human feeding 
operations), but nobody in charge seems to understand that they need to 
cull the herds as long as they get so many government subsidies to keep 
them operating.
Civilization (city-based thinking by definition) and sentience are not 
all they are cracked up to be. Urbanites (and sub-urbanites and 
ex-urbanites) think they are smarter than farmers because they have more 
money. When the money is worthless, they demand that they be taken care 
of by the farmers or the mobs band together and chain the farmers up. 
When is the Farmers' Union going to call for a 'preventive war'? How 
about a "1 Percent Doctrine"?
Sure, we can imagine peaceable rural and semi-rural areas where we feed 
our neighbors and help each other survive the coming Imperial Collapse, 
but the vast chasm between 1,000,000 people per square mile and .5 
people per square mile is going to be a problem unless cannibalism 
becomes fashionable again.

Dan C