Take down a parking lot, put up a paradise

Now (soy)

Before

Arguments from an email exchange.  

Maybe so, Thom, but there are efficiencies in specialization. To overlook this is to overlook the strength of civilization. Will you make your own cabinets, run your own pipes and plumbing? Cut your own trees? Mill your own lumber? Mine your own iron ore? Smelt it into plowshares? Growing enough food to live on is a lot of fricking work! Joyce should chime in here. They have a serious garden down there in West Virginia, and it consumes a lot of hours, but they still both have to work outside jobs.

 

Specialization-including in food production-is what gives us leisure, isn't it? What are you recommending-a future of subsistence farming like they have in, oh say, sub-Saharan Africa? That sounds attractive. No? Well, once you have specialization in food production, (because it's more efficient), then you have specialization in other areas. Sure, everybody should have some tomato plants in their yard, some potatoes, whatever, but I don't think it will replace the economies of scale-and there are simply economies of scale in specialization-of farms.

My thoughts: 

The underlying reality is that current US food production is intensively fossil fuel dependent.   Harvesters, tractors, food processing, food transportation, refrigeration all depend on our supply of fuel.  In the last hundred years, by using this cheap fuel, we have been able to expand food production and allow the population to grow to its current level of 6.8 billion humans. This is what any organism will do, expand their population to the size of its available food supply.  The UN projects population growth to achieve 9 billion by 2050, a mere 40 years from now.  Got food?  

Now, here is the problem.  We both agree that current agri-biz food production is heavily reliant on diesel and other fossil fuels.  Over the next 40 years that supply of cheap fuel will disappear as we are now beginning the slide down the back side of the depletion curve.  Food will become much more expensive,  at least the industrial food that makes Americans so fat and happy.  And what of availability?  Will the trucks continue to roll into all the towns and cities with the diminishing production from the heartland?  One doesn't need to do the thought experiment too long to see the ramifications of  $300 a barrel oil and its impact on industrial food.  

Yes, gardening is hard work, let alone farming.  But if we roll back 150 years, we see that most households maintained a set of domestic skills and knowledge that allowed them to provide a large % of their own needs, a time when "store bought"  was the exception, not the rule.   This is not sub-saharan Africa, but Altadena 1870, Denver 1850, etc.  My contention is that  the Suburban Ortho-promoted lawn culture, should be replaced by a more self reliant, organic, knowledgable ethic of Home as the basis of all food security. That food production should become localized, and the first and fundamental effort is to provide that security from the bottom up, on suburban homesteads.  And keep in mind, this is 2009, we understand the chemistry and physics and systems behavior much better than the folks there in 1850.  It's not a reversion to primitivism, or a collapse into sub-saharan subsistence, but a change to our ideological belief systems to accord more with ecological realities.  

And of course, specialization comes into play!  My associate Wil has his small machine shop in his garage.  I work with wood. I grow soy, my neighbor grows lentils, up the street he grows cabbages.  The horses here provide compost, the landscape guy specializes in drip systems, the local health food store distributes, and other local specializations come to mind:  miller, sawyer, cannery, brewery, chemist, mill wright,   etc... 

This hardly looks like Sub-Saharan Africa, but more like a local self reliant community that consumes its natural bounty within the limits set by nature.  A local community that establishes a nutrient cycle of (food - compost - food), rather than (salmonella laced crap wrapped in plastic - landfill).  The food-compost-nutrient cycle replenishes the soil, and removes the organic toxins currently used to produce food from the eco-system.  Over time, natural systems can cleanse and rejuvenate the soil, river and air systems on which our very life depends as opposed to our current system for food production which depletes the soil, relies on diminishing non-renewables, and creates dead zones in our oceans. 

I am watching this process in my own garden right now, as I take dirt that was buried beneath a concrete driveway for 30 years, and transform it magically into Soil through adding compost, planting soil enriching legumes, and adding worms and more compost every chance I get.  Within a few years, this area that was once just constuction dirt, will be a rich loam capable of providing me with some seriously luscious veggies. The coolest part is that Life shows up, the bugs, the bees, the birds, the bats, all appear over time.  The fact that I get some delicious peas and edemame from it is almost secondary.  

And of course this lifestyle, which I contend will be forced on our grandchildren, has less leisure than now.  If by leisure you mean sitting on a couch watching American Idol, this is not a bad thing.  The leisure time we will have will be more precious, and more deserved.  Those parasites of society that excessive food production has allowed to exist: the stock brokers, derivative traders, bank executives, etc ...  will most likely no longer be a luxury we can afford to feed.    

As a student of history you can surely see that human life has been thus for hundred of thousands of years, and that this current manner of living was and is only made possible by our discovery of oil, and its attendant energy bonus.  As we proceed down the depletion curve, rolling back to previous methods of living and more useful specializations will be either embraced pro-actively, or forced upon us by the geological realities now apparent.  

And the climate wild card is just that, a very wild card.  It may turn out that the only places able to grow food reliably are northen Canada and Siberia. Too bad for me, I can't eat cactus all year.