permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

On 1/20/07 12:42 PM, "sustain_ability@123mail.org"  wrote:

> http://www.verticalfarm.com/essay.htm

Initial reaction to vertical farming: I agree with the author that almost
everybody should be growing some of their own food. But that's about the
only place I agree with him. He's proposing that millions or billions of
people build 300sf per person of indoor gardening space. Sun-facing, heated,
watered, glassed-in, container-planted, etc. That will require a staggering
amount of energy and materials to set up and run. How many calories of input
per food calorie? Far more than current agriculture. And if you've ever
tried to grow much food indoors, you know that the mold, moisture, insect,
and smell problems are huge. The greenhouses would have to be isolated from
the living area. Has this guy ever tried what he is proposing the world
adopt?

He gets off on the wrong side of me by beginning:

> Undeniably, a reliable food supply has allowed for a healthier life style 
> for
most of the civilized world,

He means an oil-based food supply. Before oil, foraging was much more
reliable than farming. See Jared Diamond's article ³The worst mistake in the
history of the human race" or my own at
http://patternliteracy.com/sustag.html

Later, right after the author talks about human population peaking at about
9 billion, he says

> Vertical farming [can] supply enough food in a sustainable fashion to
>comfortably feed all of humankind for the foreseeable future

Do I really need to argue that having 6-9 billion industrialized humans is
not sustainable? Particularly if they are even more isolated from land than
they are now, with most food-growing being done indoors. He brings up that
old argument that humans should get off the land and let it "return to
nature." A population that is disconnected from its land cannot live in
harmony with that land. The idea that the Earth outside of cities should be
a nature preserve, than humans don't belong on the land, is dangerous and
repugnant. Call me a wet blanket, but there are an enormous number of things
wrong with this idea. Perhaps indoor farms can be part of the mix in urban
areas, but as a wholesale solution, the energetics are unsustainable, and it
just continues us on our trajectory away from the natural world.

Toby
__________________
Learn permaculture in at a tropical food forest in Belize this February.
Details at http://patternliteracy.com
__________________