permaculture

[sustain_ability@123mail.org]

Ok, Toby and Sean,
 
The local equivalent of vertical, err horizontal city farming on
rooftops and baclonies will hold a talk this coming Thursday on - 
"Urban agriculture and food security".
 
I will try to attend and report back to you. One of the protagonists
wrote a Master's thesis, available here -
 
http://rooftopgardens.ca/files/Making_Rooftops_Bloom_Final_Draft.pdf.

George
http://transitions.stumbleupon.com




On Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:09:09 -0800, "Toby Hemenway"
<toby@patternliteracy.com> said:
> 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

-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - A fast, anti-spam email service.