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Re: Cities/rural--resources (was Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award)
dlj@inforamp.net (David Lloyd-Jones) wrote:
>On 12 Dec 1996 19:50:06 GMT, "Richard W. Tarara"
><rtarara@saintmarys.edu> wrote:
>
>>My point made to counter DLJ's stand, is that the cities can't survive
>>without the rural support system, while the rural areas CAN survive without
>>the cities (not at current Western living standard, but survive.)
>
>Rick,
>
>You're chasing your own tail: that "rural support system" is entirely
>located in cities. Fertilizer plants, trucking, research, tax
>subsidies, education _everything that makes farming possible_ takes
>place in cities. The only thing that happens out in the country is a
>tiny number of people drive tractors around a few days a year -- and
>this will be done by robots guided by satellites quite soon.
As I read more of the crap you write, you prove yourself to be more
and more ignorant. The most important resources needed to produce food
are: topsoil, water and sunlight. In fact these are the _only_
resources needed, so Rick's point that rural areas can survive without
the cities is quite true. The opposite is not true because there are
not sufficient quantities of these resources in cities to grow the
necessary food.
Monoculture agriculture works on the premise that if you reduce an
entire ecosystem to it's simplest form, you are left with a single
crop which is easy to harvest (i.e. satellites controlling robots) and
no pests or threats to that crop. This allows the crop to be designed
to produce high yields instead of protective traits, (you can't have
both).
This requires the use of pesticides and insecticides to kill pretty
much everything, and fertilizer to sustain the nutrients which would
be there naturally if there was any real ecosystem left. Basically
energy, pollution, and more energy.
People are discovering around the world that this is not a desirable
way to produce food. India was having serious problems with their
crops after the introduction of pesticides, so they eventually
discontinued the use of them altogether.
What they did instead was take the development to the land, helping
the farmers learn about the natural ecosystem and to understand it
well enough to use it to their advantage. Simply walking the fields
and understanding the ecosystem gave them better yields than ever,
solved their environmental problems, and saved them millions.
Sounds like a big FU to those urban resources which you feel are so
important. There is a collective of land-owners working this way in
California called California Clean, and another in Saskatchewan which
I forget the name of; they're growing fast. There is nothing negative
that can be said about this, except maybe that it takes real people
who understand and care for their land. And that it costs the cities
in pesticide sales.
Jason McGinnis