permaculture

[joao pedro goncalves <joaovox@gmail.com>]

http://permaculturenews.org/2016/11/17/problem-urban-agriculture-fact-based-rebuttal-landscape-architectures-misconceptions/?mc_cid=379f312295&mc_eid=fa211ee2f7


The importance of urban agriculture (UA) is steadily growing as the issue
of urban food security rises in prominence worldwide. Localised agriculture
has historically always been the domain of communities, driven and lead by
skilled and committed individuals who grew food to sustain their people.
Furthermore, localised agriculture has worked without major problems,
otherwise we wouldn’t be here today to be discussing the subject!

In the western world, localized agriculture has been intentionally driven
out of urban public spaces and even declared taboo. This irrational fad
started in the 17th century and has continued to the present day, but
luckily, all things change. Clearly, the writing is on the wall. The
increasing public interest in UA is creating shockwaves that are reaching
the establishment, the very people who continue their current unsustainable
practices which enforce the creation of urban food deserts.
[image: Geoff-Lawton-Online] <http://start.geofflawtononline.com/>

What we’re now seeing is curious state of affairs where a schism is
emerging amongst the greatest opponents of UA who have vested interests in
keeping it out of public spaces. Some of the landscape architecture
profession are toying with the fanciful idea of repositioning themselves
where they believe they rightfully belong (entitlement?) as the experts and
authorities in the area of UA (which they have neither expertise or
authority in) while others are digging in their heels and preparing to
oppose the rise of UA at all costs with campaigns of misinformation.

In order for UA to thrive and to reclaim our sovereign birthright to grow
our own food, we need to counter the misinformation put out by those
protecting their questionable interests. That’s precisely what we’ll do
here!
Setting the facts straight

What follows is a fact-based rebuttal of a badly researched and gravely
misinformed subjective opinion piece of an article titled “What’s the
Problem with Urban Agriculture?”
<http://landarchs.com/whats-the-problem-with-urban-agriculture/> published
by the Landscape Architects Network.

In my previous article Cities – Food Free Zones? The Creation of the Urban
Food Desert
<http://permaculturenews.org/2016/08/03/cities-food-free-zones-creation-urban-food-desert/>
I discuss the history, training and skill set of this profession, pointing
out the fact that in general landscape architect have little to no skill in
plant design. They definitely have no formal training in horticulture or
agriculture, let alone growing food, yet they somehow feel entitled to
writes critiques on UA.

This uninformed criticism from unqualified parties has two major
consequences. Firstly, it leads to a very ill-informed public debate based
on unsubstantiated opinion. Secondly, it creates a source of disinformation
which gullible local governments unthinkingly swallow – hook, line and
sinker from their *‘professional advisers’*. The end result is that UA is
seen to be *‘problematic’* by local governments, who then oppose community
food security efforts at every step, allowing landscape architects to free
reign to continue designing urban food deserts based on aesthetic design
principles, and nothing changes.
Subjective and objective realities

The curious thing about humans is they can live in multiple realities
simultaneously – objective, factual realities that can be quantified by
science, and subjective realities that only exist in the human mind,
divorced from any real fact, based on opinion and interpretation and
coloured by bias and personal prejudice.

The article in question that we’ll be rebutting falls firmly into the
latter case, pure subjective opinion blended with what appears to be some
misguided referencing of large-scale broadacre rural agriculture textbook
material and data which is not relevant to the subject at hand.

So, without further ado, let’s critically examine the short article *“What’s
the Problem with Urban Agriculture?”* published by the Landscape Architects
Network, and correct the fallacies with fact and reason.
Having issue with the activities of millions

The article starts with the opening paragraph:

*• “With urban agriculture popping up everywhere, we take a step back and
look at some unresolved issues that need to be addressed before we can
consider urban agriculture as a permanent solution to our food needs.”*

Well, excuse me, I didn’t realise the landscape architecture profession was
a key decision maker in global food security matters. First factual error
corrected, UA is already a permanent solution to our food needs and is a
growing phenomenon.

To quote United Nations research data *“The role of urban agriculture (UA)
in the food supply of cities and towns, as a complement to rural
agriculture, is becoming an important issue in a globalizing world economy.
It is estimated that approximately 800 million people worldwide engage in
urban agriculture… there is evidence that UA is increasing in many urban
areas, sometimes dramatically so, particularly in developing countries.
…Recent estimates indicate that 72 percent of all urban households in
Russia raise food, and 68 percent do so in Tanzania. Berlin has over 80,000
urban farmers, while in China the 14 largest cities produce 85 percent or
more of their vegetables.”* (1)

I question the author’s lack of perspective. UA raises unresolved issues
for whom? Landscape architects? Urban agriculture is a piece of a larger
solution that also incorporates peri-urban and rural agriculture to create
a decentralised and resilient food system. Each of these three elements
have their inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Perhaps the issue to be addressed in the author’s mind and that of his
profession is what will happen to their work if they have to share
their *‘blank
canvas’* public space with the rabble who want to grow food for the boring
uninteresting purposes of food security, food sovereignty, food justice and
food equality. My suggestion is that they can go back to the role that gave
birth to their profession, creating *‘designed landscapes’* for wealthy
people who loved to waste valuable land as a show of opulence.
Mistaking necessities for fashions

In the next paragraph, we see:

*• “Urban agriculture — also known as urban farming, guerrilla farming,
foodscaping, and by many other terms relating to agricultural practices in
the middle of the city — is becoming all the rage in societies all over the
world. Urban agriculture provides many benefits, including food security
for people in the city, a reduction of energy used in conventional
agricultural practices and food service, a reduction of carbon footprints,
and environmental services for cities in terms of providing open green
space.”*

Urban agriculture is “becoming all the rage” because there is the serious
issue of food security looming, it is not dictated by the vain aesthetic
fashion trends or fads (‘rages’) that drive landscape architecture. It is
driven by real community needs.

A historical perspective is needed here. It has always been the default
human practice of human societies to grow food close to where we since the
very beginnings of agriculture 12,000 years ago. We deviated away from
localised agriculture once societies became industrialised under the
‘ornamentals only’ influence of landscape architecture. We reverted back to
‘victory gardens’ in public spaces to grow food during wartime, much to the
chagrin of landscape architects who complained that they ‘messed up their
designs’. This current state of foodless public landscapes is a sad
historical exception and not the norm for human civilisation.

More misunderstanding follows in the next section:

*• “All over the world, people are turning unused lots, back yards, and
even rooftops into gardens. Imagine if this movement could grow so massive
that cities would no longer have to depend on rural and suburban
agriculture to produce food for their own citizens.”*

Imagine if we all held hands and there was world peace… That is just idle
fantasy and wholly impractical, there are upper limits of how much people
can be sustained per unit area biologically, just as with any other animal.
The issue is not how much food natural spaces can produce, the issue is
unsustainable human population densities – a problem created by another lot
of misguided *‘designers’* but that’s another whole issue in itself.
An exercise in convoluted logic

Reasoning gets somewhat fuzzy at this point:

*• “Unfortunately, like the two sides of a coin, there are always pros and
cons. Some people still believe that there are lots of challenges facing
urban agricultural practices and potential problems regarding the impact if
it is done wrong.”*
[image: If things are done wrong then things will go wrong]If things are
done wrong then things will go wrong

The logic here is tedious, as anything ‘’done wrong” will create problems.
This is a tautology, as it is saying that if things are done wrong then
things will go wrong, which isn’t really saying anything!

This also begs the question, why would UA be done wrong? Because the plant
design will be carried out by people with no skill in plant design, such as
landscape architects? Done wrong as in designing food deserts in public
spaces filled with ‘ornamental fluff’ because we have an irrational
cultural fixation that associates food growing with poor people? It’s quite
funny that landscape architects can raise the matter of things being done
wrong, a bit of self-reflection might be insightful collectively for a
profession that lacks a feedback loop and a capacity for self-analysis.
Maybe they’re so arrogant to believe that they can never do any wrong…
The mini farm mentality, the fixation with the rural agriculture model

At this point the subjective realities we spoke about earlier enter the
equation:

*• “Here are some of the problems facing urban agriculture:*

* No More Space: Is it Worth it to Farm in the Middle of the City? As we
all know, in a big city there are no more spaces left on which to build;
they even sometimes lack open green space. Even when there are still unused
public or private lands, the prices are sky high. While urban agricultural
practices often put idle land into productive use, in other cases, farmers
take over land planned or set aside for other purposes, mostly economic
purposes. *

*The government usually believes that where the use of land is not managed
and an economic rent is not paid, urban farming may be an economically or
environmentally inefficient use of the property. These land rent issues
sometimes become the biggest obstacle to urban agriculture when a
government does not pay enough attention to regulating land use to
encourage farming.”*

Urban agriculturists and Permaculture practitioners would beg to differ
about the point of *“no more space”*, we can still see plenty of viable
space to grow in even the densest of cities. The unspoken premise here,
based on ignorant opinion, is that we want and need to create ‘mini-farms’
in the middle of the city that are just scaled down rural farms, occupying
vast stretches of expensive urban land.

Every garden bed, irrespective of size, can be used to grow food. Landscape
architects might not want to entertain the notion that any of the ineptly
created, boring, clichéd, supposedly aesthetic ornamental ‘gardens’ they
design can be replaced with functional designs that produce food.

As far as economic purposes go, what price do you put on food security and
community building?

This argument raises a rather difficult question for the author, are the
ornamental food deserts being produced by the landscape architecture
profession ‘economically or environmentally efficient’? Many would
disagree. How many landscapes address social justice issues? How many are
chemical free and environmentally friendly? Is the obsessively tidy and
overly contrived ‘man-controlling-nature’ visual aesthetic which is
overused by landscape architects ‘efficient’ in any way or a tired fashion
statement?
Habitation salad – completely mixing up deserts, cities, urban and rural
areas

Next we see some confusion between like-for-like examples and apple-orange
comparisons:

*• “High Water Requirement for Agricultural Activities – According to Urban
Agriculture: Food Jobs and Sustainable Cities, published by The Urban
Agriculture Network, some urban farmers are still using water from the
potable municipal water supply, which can create water shortages in the
city. A survey showed that although four of 10 households active in
gardening in Amman, Jordan, use some gray water for irrigation, most
households (86 percent) rely on the public water network for at least part
of their irrigation needs.”*

Seriously, Jordan is desert, an extreme arid environment! Yes, such places
are known to have water shortages, that’s why they are called deserts. Most
modern cities are not built on deserts, they have adequate rainfall, and
the civil engineers are traditionally tasked with the job of ensuring that
as much rainfall as possible is channelled into stormwater drains where it
mixes with pollutants and is washed into the ocean, ensuring a net loss of
freshwater from inland areas.

Some enlightened urban planning types have discovered the concept of
permeable paving which permits rainwater to seep into the ground, allowing
groundwater to be replenished, which stops trees dying. Who would have
thought that letting water seep into the soil could be a good thing?

While we’re on the topic of Jordan, most of their agriculture does not use
‘public drinking water’. In Wadi Rum, a desert valley 60km east of Jordan’s
only coastal city Aqaba, a 2,000-hectare farm named Rum Farm provides much
of the food consumed in Jordan. The Food Tank article entitled “This 2,000
Hectare Farm in the Desert Feeds Most of Jordan” gives us the whole story –

*“In Wadi Rum, or the Valley of the Moon as it is often called, agriculture
has thrived for more than twenty years. In 1986, the Rum Farm was
established on 2,000 hectares of desert. At first glance, farming in a
desert may seem inefficient or even impossible, but a key geographical
feature actually makes farming in the Wadi Rum conceivable. Below this
desert lies a large aquifer, which provides drinking water to most
Jordanians and water to support the crops grown above it. Water is pulled
from the aquifer 30 to 400 meters deep and then used to irrigate 78
hectares of circular fields. These fields, which look like crop circles in
aerial photographs, rely on pivoting watering mechanisms to grow crops.
According to the Managing Director of Rum Farm, Sijal Majali, “the farm
employs between 300-600 workers seasonally – who produce 1,800 tons of
grapes, 20,000 tons of potatoes, 10,000 tons of onions, and thousands more
tons of apricots, nectarines, peaches, pears, tomatoes, figs, olives, corn,
lettuce, oranges, mandarin, grapefruit, cabbage, broccoli, squash, loquat,
dates and more…”*

Again, the author’s facts don’t hold water, pardon the pun. The water comes
from a natural water source, it’s not mains water supply from a dam. The
fact that they have such a community that grows most of its food locally
and employs so many people is an exemplary example of clever functional
design.

What would landscape architects do in the desert? Put in more hard
landscaping like they do everywhere to absorb heat and make the environment
more hostile to life? They would be frustrated trying to put trendy looking
expensive paving on shifting sands. Maybe they could helicopter in some
piece of exorbitantly overpriced useless contorted pre-fabricated concrete
structure painted in garish colours and claim it’s abstract art and call it
a day?

*• “Overuse of surface or groundwater can reduce the city water supply. In
some of the cities, this problem is well mitigated by using treated
wastewater for irrigation. Low-cost water-saving technologies such as
underground and drip irrigation also can help to increase water efficiency,
as can allowing safe use of low-quality water resources in some cases.”*

So what is the city’s water supply for again? Primary human needs (water
and food) or watering manicured lawns or ornamental public gardens designed
by landscape architects? So using water to grow food is bad is it? Is
having purpose-built impermeable surfaces that flush perfectly usable
rainwater into stormwater drains then out to sea a better option than using
rainwater to grow food?

This is really a case of the author reading all the wrong rural agriculture
textbooks from the local library for reference. UA is not a commercial
large-scale broadacre farm and does not have similar intensive water
requirements! We aren’t talking hundreds of acres of lettuce growing in
wide open windswept fields in bare soil. A lack of real world experience is
showing through here.

Urban gardeners are well versed in water-wise gardening, we don’t get
subsidised water like rural agriculturists do, and these water-saving
techniques only work UA scale setups. Ever tried mulching several acres of
garden beds? UA is qualitatively different from its rural counterpart, and
water requirements are also.

We can play another game here too. We don’t necessarily need additional
water to drastically expand UA in cities. Where does the water come from to
irrigate the prissy unsustainable gardens in public spaces that landscape
architects design? If we rip up and replace the useless and inappropriate
plant species that landscape architects specify that need bucket-loads of
chemicals to keep alive with more resilient and deeper rooted perennial
productive plants, we can also achieve a net sustainability gain through
decreased water use.
Further confusion about agribusiness and UA

Inappropriate reference material can lead to strange conclusions as we see
here:

• Soil and Water Pollution Lead to Waterborne Diseases – According to FAO,
inappropriate and excessive use of agricultural inputs from pesticides,
fertilizer, nitrogen, and raw organic matter can pollute the soil in an
urban area. The chemical substances become residues in the soil, making it
less fertile or even poisonous in the long term. These residues then may
leach or runoff into the main water sources of the city. Chemical and
mycobacterial contamination of the water sources can lead to several
waterborne diseases, such as dysentery, salmonella, cholera, and
schistosomisis.

Once again the author has difficulty differentiating between rural and
urban agriculture, indicating little depth of understanding of the subject
matter. There is so much wrong here that to be honest, dealing with this
level of ignorance is rather tedious. It’s also a classic straw-man
argument, a case of propping up an imaginary problem or opponent to attack.

UA is community run, it’s not about poisoning people for money as is the
case with agribusiness. Those who grow what they eat don’t poison it, most
community gardens actually grow organic food, free of synthetic chemicals
and poisons!

Highly toxic agricultural grade chemicals are restricted, meaning that it
is illegal for them to be sold to the general public. Here in Australia,
schedule 7 poisons can only be purchased by holders of restricted chemical
permits, issued by the government. The chemicals are even restricted in
terms of when and how they are used by rural farmers, and are not
definitely allowed in urban areas.

The runoff from urban areas does not go into the city’s water supply, it
goes down the stormwater drain into the ocean. That’s the problem with
cut-and-pasting from rural references and using them as facts in UA
discussions, they don’t make any sense.
[image: Happy businessman making okay gesture against eye test. Makes no
sense.]Happy businessman making okay gesture against eye test. Makes no
sense. Hypocrisy and self-awareness

The landscape architecture profession can use a some much needed
self-reflection. Fancy creating straw man arguments suggesting that UA
practices may poison the environment when conventional ornamental
gardening, landscape architecture style, is guilty of this very thing.

How many unsustainable and ill-though out garden designs do we see in
public spaces that require ongoing application of weedkillers such as
glyphosate or worse to stop lawns encroaching on paths, garden beds or
trees (against which people sit). These chemicals have been implicated in
some serious human health concerns and the evidence is mounting.

Maybe landscape architects should consider how their inept soft landscaping
(plant design) which has no ecological design rationale, and treats living
plants as lifeless ‘architectural features’ with different colours, shapes
and heights is a major contributor to the poisoning of the urban
environment,

Plant design is not interior design, plants are living things, landscape
architects should either learn about ecology or stick to paving! They get
away with a lot of really bad plant design by relying on poisonous
chemicals as a crutch to prop them up. Garden maintenance crews are
expected to keep badly design gardens alive, which usually necessitates the
use of systemic pesticides such as the neonicotinoids banned in Europe for
toxicity to bees. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, even at
straw men!
Misunderstanding the current synthetic chemical food contamination issues

The inability to differentiate between urban and rural agriculture issues
leads to further spurious arguments:

*• “Contaminated Food – Serious Health Problems – Urban areas used as farms
are highly susceptible to containing toxic substances, such as heavy metals
including lead, zinc, copper, tin, mercury, and arsenic. The main sources
of metals in urban soils are mainly from emissions from factories,
automobiles, and sewage. The high amount of heavy metal substances may lead
to a serious health problem for consumers. The contaminated food issue
becomes even worse if there is an occurrence of food-borne parasitic
disease caused by poor hygiene in an urban area.”*

Food-borne parasitic diseases? We are talking about modern cities, we don’t
fertilize with ‘night soil’ (raw humanure) like they do in some parts of
remote rural China.

Food grown by home gardeners is less likely to be contaminated with the
toxic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. If food is grown by
agribusiness, they will have contaminated it for you, and there’s nothing
you can do about it! With UA the gardeners have the choice, and they always
choose the healthier option.

In respect to automotive pollution and heavy metal contamination, it’s an
issue that all urban gardeners are aware of and know how to take remedial
action.

Speaking of contamination, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in the
USA, a large not-for-profit, independent group comprised of many experts
including scientists and other researchers, analysed data from the US
Department of Agriculture and the US Food and Drug Administration from
2013, covering 34,000 produce samples, and found that almost two-thirds
contained pesticide residues. All produce was tested as it would be
consumed, washed and peeled if appropriate. Their key findings were as
follows:

• “99 percent of apple samples, 98 percent of peaches, and 97 percent of
nectarines tested positive for at least one pesticide residue

• The average potato had more pesticides by weight than any other produce

• A single grape sample and a sweet bell pepper sample contained 15
pesticides

• Single samples of cherry tomatoes, nectarines, peaches, imported snap
peas and strawberries showed 13 different pesticides apiece” (3)

There already is an issue with food contamination in the US. A Similar
study by Friends of the Earth (FoE) found similar food contamination issues
in Australia (4). The details are discussed in more detail in Sustainable
Gardening Australia’s article “Pesticides in Fruit and Vegetables”. (5) UA
is a viable solution for producing uncontaminated food and addressing the
issue.

There are many solutions currently employed by UA to overcome contamination
issues, such as selection of plant and tree species that do not uptake
contaminants, soil sequestering through humus enrichment, raised beds and
wicking beds, container gardening, hydroponics and aquaponics. UA is not
seeking to replicate the ecological disaster that is rural agriculture
because people do care about what they eat.
Aerial crop-spraying community gardens?

The ‘mini-farm’ delusion is perpetuated in the next section:

*• Air Pollution – The old problem of any agricultural practice is still
the conventional use of pesticides. For urban agriculture, it becomes even
worse, because harmful chemicals applied in the middle of the city travel
into the atmosphere of the dense and crowded urban environment, potentially
harming a big population. Allergies, cancer, birth defects, male sterility,
contamination of breast milk, genetic mutations, respiratory diseases,
behavioral changes, and a variety of intestinal disorders could add another
problem for the city if the pesticides issue not handled properly. Would
you want your food growing in the middle of a polluted city? *

Yes, the arguments keep getting worse and worse. I’m not sure which reality
the author is dealing with but it surely isn’t an objective one! This is
getting repetitive, once again the author has difficulty differentiating
between rural and urban agriculture, indicating any depth of understanding
of the subject matter.

The air pollution we’re seeing where there is unregulated expansion of
industry is not worldwide, we’re seeing it in China now, as it similarly
manifested in sooty early-industrial England.

There’s a reason why we wash your food, even chimpanzees have learned to do
it as a social convention.

I’ve already addressed the myth of UA practitioners spraying community
gardens with restricted agricultural pesticides, this is nonsense, where
does this landscape architect get these crazy ideas?

I have never seen a community garden group rig up a drone with a pesticide
sprayer to do aerial spraying yet, this is just plain silly ivory-tower
delusion from someone who sits on a computer all day dragging pretty little
shapes and placing them on a grid. Out of touch, oh yeah!

[image: Gaming in VR glasses]
An unhealthy obsession with pathological tidiness

If the previous arguments by the landscape architect critic were somewhat
disingenuous, I can assure you this next one is very real for them. Now we
get to really telling part, the aspect of UA that genuinely, really, truly
bothers landscape architects

*• Aesthetic Issues – Some people say that urban agriculture is giving an
unpleasant view of the city. What do you think? In some cases, the image of
a cattle corral, pigs at a town dump, poorly tended vegetable patches in a
community park, or chickens in a front yard can be offensive to many.
Because urban agriculture is more exposed to public view, it should be well
designed to make sure the visual appearance is as sweet as possible. And it
goes without saying that this aesthetic issue is a landscape architect’s
responsibility, so it is our duty to bring this practice into the city in a
beautiful way.*

This one has to be my all-time favourite, the most pathetic argument to
come out of the landscape architecture profession, that is echoed in
article after article where they talk about their greatest concern – their
pathological obsession with contrived tidiness. Personal and cultural
subjective aesthetic preferences are hardly the grounds for stating
objective arguments.

Again, we’re dealing with some altered version of reality dreamed up in the
authors head of what UA entails. What are we discussing here exactly?
Third-world derelict towns, post-apocalyptic shanty towns or intensive
animal operations? Commercial agribusiness *‘Confined Animal Feeding
Operations’ (CAFOs)* in public spaces? Who the hell would propose such a
ludicrous idea. UA advocates are community and health-focussed and are most
strongly against factory farming of any sort, we sure as hell would not set
them up where we live.

So, we have self-appointed fashion police whose job it is to dictate
aesthetics to us lumbering troglodytes without any appreciation for
apparent beauty. Humans may all agree that Nature is beautiful, we’re
hardwired neurologically that way. But what of man-made aesthetics? Who
decides what is beautiful? I wasn’t aware that the philosophical debate had
ever been resolved, perhaps the landscape architecture departments forgot
to phone the philosophy departments in the universities to tell them to
conclude that field of enquiry because they found the answer.

Oh the curse of a middle-class, first world, culturally isolated existence!
In all places around the world where the creatively challenged,
conservative and historically outdated profession of landscape architecture
has not taken root to dictate 17th century English ornamental garden
aesthetic ideals on public spaces, they somehow happily grow food in public
spaces without any concerns or issues. Maybe it’s time for this profession
to look outside the Anglosphere and ask all those people in other countries
how they do it, or is it a case of not stooping to those they consider
beneath them due to cultural superiority?

The truth is that the author is mixing up annual vegetable growing with
perennial food producing plants and trees. The former has a boom-bust cycle
of six months, whereas perennials lend themselves to very aesthetic designs
as they are slower growing, more structured, and more visually interesting.
Annuals and perennials can also be blended together in food forests and
underplanted orchards amongst other designs. This is a huge design topic
big enough to fill a book. Also, moving beyond simplistic aesthetic visual
design, we can progress into multisensory gardens that appeal to all five
of our senses, and still work at night too! Surely the author must have
heard of the highly ornamental and functional orangeries that started in
the Renaissance gardens of Italy, and spread through Europe, or the highly
decorative English conservatories filled with rare and exotic edibles?

Edible functional gardens and visual appeal are not mutually exclusive,
it’s just that such a task exceeds the limited plant design skills of your
regular landscape architect. The erroneous logic here is “if I can’t do it,
it can’t be done”. Without any real training in plant design, horticulture
or agriculture, what makes any landscape architect think they are more able
to do this than any other random unskilled person off the street.
Landscape architects feel justified to ban UA, but they pity all the
starving children

The author concludes this poorly researched criticism of UA with this
comment:

*• All of these problems can be an obvious reason to ban or stop urban
agricultural practices. But can you imagine all the possibilities we could
lose as exploding population growth and food security become major issues
in the world? It’s just too much. There are a million ways to solve the
problem without sacrificing the opportunity to stop world hunger.*

Really? *“…an obvious reason to ban or stop urban agricultural practices”?*
With such questionable reasoning, I hardly feel compelled to notify those
800 million people already practising UA worldwide that some person who
sits on a computer all day (dragging shapes in a CAD program, with no
horticulture, agriculture or garden design skills) said there are problems
with what they’re doing – feeding themselves and their communities. Perhaps
the landscape architects out of the goodness of their hearts permit such
atrocities as UA to continue because they pity the starving children…
A new threat on the UA horizon

The acknowledgment of food security leaves me with a faint glimmer of hope,
but if the sheer wall of ignorance we have seen is representative of the
rest of the profession, I suspect UA practitioners will be seeing a new
obstruction on the landscape as this problematic profession decides that
they should be in charge of UA in cities and try to place themselves in
positions of ‘experts’ to remain relevant professionally as the interest in
public land use shifts from elite ‘play-toy’ to something that serves real
community needs. They are actually discussing this!

This arduous exercise has left me with many thoughts, many concerns, but it
appears that others have come to the same conclusions.


-- 
João Gonçalves
http://ecotrabalho.com
http://permacultureglobal.com/users/902-joao-goncalves
+ 351 96 96 80 009
Alcântara - Lisboa e Chão Sobral - Oliveira do Hospital - Serra do Açor -
Portugal

"Hoje, ao escolher o que comer e o que comprar está a decidir se os seus
filhos vão herdar um planeta em melhor ou pior estado daquele que você
encontrou."

"Today as you choose what to eat and what to buy you decide if your
children will inherit a planet in a better or worse shape than you found
it."

Para descobrir:
Documentário "Alface" na Aldeia das Amoreiras
http://vimeo.com/58999047
Herdade do Freixo do Meio
http://herdadedofreixodomeio.pt/
"Comida que nunca acaba" / Permacultura no Malawi
http://www.neverendingfood.org/
Centro de Ecologia Integral
http://www.integralecology.org
Nyumbani - Kenya
http://www.nyumbani.org/about-us