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Re: Cities/rural--resources (was Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award)
Toby Reiter wrote:
< snip...>
> You have a very good point. Wait....no you don't.
>
> 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 Reiter
You must be kidding, right? How long has Malthus been dead now? And he
was wrong before that. Why was he wrong? Read about Germany in the
19th century.
It is/was not possible to have the kind of per-acre yeilds that now
support us without the use of fertilizer chemistry and mechanized
farming. Period.
The truth is: the financial structure makes it possible for large
scale farming to exist, which makes it possible to farm with very
low margins and good economy of scale. As unromantic and crude
as corporate farming seems, it works.
If farming was suddenly transformed to a forty-acres-and-a-mule
paradigm, a significant fraction of the world's population would
die in the first year.
Sorry, Toby. We can't go back, no matter what.
--
Les Cargill Optical Data Systems, Inc.
lcargill@ods.com 1101 E. Arapaho Road
(214) 238-5351 Richardson, Tx 75081
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