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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] regional diets/urban vs rural

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  • From: robert waldrop <rmwj@soonernet.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] regional diets/urban vs rural
  • Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 23:34:38 -0500

Toby Hemenway wrote:
>
>I'd much rather be in a city than out here in the sticks when the oil >runs
>out.

It is really hard to peer ahead and figure out what will happen when the
free flowing stream of humanure hits the ventilation device. For what
it's worth, I'm sticking with the city, although it is a particular city
(Oklahoma City). I'm not sure though about some of the really big
meglaopolises like LA, NY etc.

Part of my reasoning is that the energy decline is not a sudden event,
like y2k was supposed to be, but rather an ongoing grind. Thus there
will be an ongoing stream of adaptations, and I wonder if rural areas
will be able to adapt better than urban areas. For one thing, there
will be some biofuel action and if you have a farm, you have room to set
aside some acres for pecan trees or (worst case) soybeans to make fuel
to both get you around your "neighborhood" and produce your crops (which
is what I think will be the primary use of biofuels, and I think they
will generally be made on site by the users, rather than in large
biofuel refineries for shipment to users).

One thing that has driven the rural to urban migration is the increasing
use of fossil fuels on farms and the invention of various kinds of farm
equipment. As the energy decline deepens, and farmers become more
reliant perhaps only on biofuels they can make, then there will be an
increasing need for more human labor in food production. Increasing
employment in agriculture will be, I think, one result of the energy
decline and thus provide an economic incentive for leaving the city and
moving to rural areas.

As to interest in sustainability in rural areas, that indeed is a patchy
thing, but I am personally very encouraged by the couple of hundred or
so Oklahoma producers we are in contact with in our developing local
food system, many of them are very interested in developing more
sustainable ways to farm their lands.

I suspect there will be surprises all around as this develops, and
especially if we can avoid large scale warfare, many of them may be
pleasant surprises.

Robert Waldrop, OKC
>
PS. loved your book, it really helped jump start my own little urban
project.




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