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Cities are for People: The Limits of Localism
Adam Stein, WorldChanging
Columbia Professor Dickson Despommier has generated a fair amount of attention with his concept for “vertical farms,” stacked, self-contained urban biosystems that would — theoretically — supply fresh produce for city residents year round. The New York Times showcased outlandish artists’ conceptions of what such farms might look like. Colbert did his shtick. Twelve pilot projects are supposedly under consideration, in locations as far-flung as China and Dubai.
The concept has captured the imagination of at least the sliver of the public (including the editors at Worldchanging), who laments the enormous resource demands of our food production system and yearns for something easier on the land, easier on our aquifers, and less demanding of fossil fuels. Vertical farms seem to promise all that.
Promising, of course, is different than delivering. Construction requires a lot of energy. Keeping vegetables warm in winter requires a lot of energy. Recycling water requires a lot of energy. Generating artificial sunlight requires a lot of energy. In other words, the secret ingredient that makes vertical farms work (assuming they work at all) is boatloads of energy. No one seems to have actually done the math on the monetary and environmental costs of such a scheme, but they would no doubt be considerable.
… Cities offer a lot of environmental benefits, at least compared to the alternatives. There are many reasons this is so, but they all spring from a fairly basic fact: cities are built for people. Lots of people, densely packed, sharing resources. Innovations that encourage or take advantage of that density are likely to make cities more sustainable. And innovations that undermine density have a lot of work to do to overcome their inherent environmental disadvantages.
(8 August 2008)
Long-overdue skepticism about vertical farms. However this is not really an argument against localism. Traditionally, cities depended on close-in farming to grow food. Still local, but not in the high rent district. -BA
The Locavore’s Dilemma: Finding Places to Plant
Becky O’Malley, Berkeley Daily Planet
… Here’s Willow Rosenthal, who runs City Slicker Farms in Oakland, expounding on the victory garden dream on the Slow Food Nation Convention’s website, slowfoodnation.org:
“So what are the possibilities in San Francisco? Because of our long growing season in the Bay Area, intensive urban agriculture can provide from one to three pounds of produce per square foot per year. Each person consumes approximately 300 pounds of fruits and vegetables per year. That means a space of 10’x10’ to 20’x20’ (100-300 square feet of growing space, not counting paths) would be needed to grow ALL of the fruits and vegetables for each person.
… Just do the numbers: sounds lovely, doesn’t it? I’m ready for it myself. I don’t have a backyard as such, but I do have four tomato plants growing on a flat roof.
But there’s a catch, a big one. The commendable push to get you to eat food grown near home, especially in your city backyard, is likely to run smack up against another equally Greenish cause, urban infill. For at least 10 years backyards and their proprietors have been the target of scorn by some of those who want to preserve farms in, for example, Brentwood.
One of the endorsers of the upcoming Slow Show is Greenbelt Alliance, whose bread-and-butter for the last eight or 10 years has been endorsing-for a consideration, of course-the kind of development optimistically labelled Smart Growth. And the Smart-Growthers’ favorite derogatory epithet is N.I.M.B.Y.: Not In My-yes-Backyard.
…The problem is that it’s all too easy for all of us to march in different directions, all flying our personal green flags. Plausible-sounding plans to fill up every remaining open space in our already developed urban areas could mean that there will be nowhere left to put our victory gardens. The lovely Spiral Gardens plot on Martin Luther King, for example, is now a parking lot and will soon be a building site.
(7 August 2008)
Can Cattle Save Us From Global Warming?
Jay Walljasper, WorldChanging
On an unseasonably warm and sunny winter morning-the kind that lulls you into thinking global climate change can’t be so bad-a group of environmentalists and sustainable agriculture advocates gather over muffins and coffee on a California ranch to discuss a bold initiative to reverse the greenhouse effect. It’s a diverse group-longtime ranchers, a forestry professor from Berkeley, organic food activists, a Vermont dairy farmer, the author of a famous children’s book-united in their belief that current proposals to address the climate crisis don’t go far enough.
… Wick-who owns this ranch in the hills of Marin County north of San Francisco with Peggy Rathmann, author of the classic picture book _Goodnight Gorilla_-goes on to outline the climate crisis in terms all-too-familiar to anyone paying attention to the issue. But he then offers a solution that would astonish most people, especially green activists: “Eat a local grass-fed burger.”
“It will take carbon out of the air and put it back into the soil,” chimes in Abe Collins, the Vermont dairy farmer.
This idea is shocking on two counts:
First, the cattle industry and meat eating are targeted as a leading cause of global warming, up there with autos, jet planes and coal-burning power plants. The animal rights group People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for instance, recently launched an ad campaign declaring, “Meat is the No. 1 Cause of Global Warming.”
Second, efforts to stop global warming have been focused almost entirely on reducing emissions, not in taking existing carbon out of the atmosphere (a process known as known as carbon sequestration).
(8 August 2008)
Nigeria: Farming – the Neglected Obligation”
Idris Abba Disa, Daily Trust
The above quotation is an old adage in Hausa language. It can roughly be translated as “Farming, the root of wealth, an old form of trade, and anyone that comes to the world meets you.”…
…But today, farming in Nigeria is viewed as a way of meeting ends for the rural populace with only very few rich and those in “position” engaging in poultry or fish farming while others into animal husbandry. Products from the latter farmers are only utilised by about two per cent the of Nigerian population. Farming has been neglected in Nigeria, in that only the peasant farmers that largely depend on hoes, cutlasses and other crude tools, whose annual income could hardly afford them inputs…
(3 August 2008)
The Food Crisis and Global Institutions
Alexandra Spieldoch, Foreign Policy in Focus
The food crisis reflects a breakdown in our global food system that threatens to worsen poverty, hunger, climate change, and insecurity. Global institutions and governments are responding, yet their answers are vastly inadequate. For decades, trade and investment liberalization have undermined human rights and the environment. The food crisis should help us to understand that now it is time for a new vision of global cooperation, one that is democratic and accountable to people and the planet.
… The World Bank’s New Deal on Global Food Policy calls for building a safety net and increasing loans for agricultural production and trade liberalization. Unfortunately, the World Bank’s investment agenda is largely defined by partnerships with international corporations to expand trade flows rather than to support farmers and promote food sovereignty. In this context, agribusiness groups who control the export markets will gain the most.
… Perhaps a more promising set of recommendations comes out of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which 58 governments approved in Johannesburg, South Africa in April. This report is the result of a six-year process that involved over 400 authors.
The report is groundbreaking, both in its process and its content.
(5 August 2008)
