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  • From: "Laurence Gaffney" <lgaffney@bigpond.com>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Urban/ Rural Footprint
  • Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:07:26 +1000

The following article - Is Humanity Fatally Successful? :-
http://www.scarp.ubc.ca/rees%20Is%20Humanity%20Fatally%20Successful.pdf
is by William E Rees co-originator of the Ecological Footprint approach in
which he makes the following statement:-
"What eco-footprinting shows is that, in ecological terms, the Dutch don't
live in Holland. Similarly, urban dwellers don't "live"in their cities;
urbanization simply separates us from the productive ecosystems that sustain
us but lie far beyond the urban boundary. An apt analogy is "the city as
human feedlot." Like the city, a livestock feedlot is an area with an
extraordinarily high density of consumer animals and a corresponding major
waste management problem. Cities and feedlots are incomplete ecosystems - the
productive land component is some distance away."

As I read this I thought of Toby Hemenway's thought provoking article of 2005
entitled Peal Oil and Urban Sustainability.
http://patternliteracy.com/urban.html

Laurence Gaffney



  • [permaculture] Urban/ Rural Footprint, Laurence Gaffney, 06/17/2009

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