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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.


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