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Re: Cities/rural--resources (was Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award)
On Thu, 12 Dec 1996 20:19:07 EDT, Toby Reiter <str4552@OBERLIN.EDU>
wrote:
>Here's why: all of your assumptions about the necessity of cities is
>based upon a consumer-based view of agriculture. Fertilizer, trucks,
>research, subsidies, and even bureaucratic education (the kind that comes
>from cities) is required to produce healthy, productive harvests. Using
>old-fashioned organic methods, solar-powered tractors (you know, the ones
>that have babies), and intimate knowledge of the land and seasons it is
>possible to create just as bountiful a harvest as using sick land with
>artificial fertilizers, artificial seeds, and oil based tractors. The
>idea that agriculture needs the stock exchange in order to survive is
>inherently inaccurate (what happened before there was a Chicago, for
>instance).
>
>I'd like to see a city try and survive without any rural inputs. The
>truth is that it can't. Cities, because they are inhabited, cannot
>provide their own raw materials, even if people are willing to conserve
>every single waste product and turn it into something useful (which they
>aren't.) Even if this did occur, it would be impossible to insure clean
>water and fuel supply unless rural resources were imported.
Toby,
The two paragraphs above are the most stunning combination of
technical halfwittedness and moral offensiveness that I have seen in
quite a while.
You should log off your computer when you leave it, to prevent people
from posting stuff like that with your name on it.
-dlj.
References: