[Response to Slate's Green Food article]
Picture this: instead of suburban sprawl, there are residential clusters that surround the manufacturing or other business centers. Here, near these centers, people actually live, and the countryside is spread with farms small and large. It's kind of like the New England of 1950, but without the factory pollution. Before the highway program and the green revolution took off, stranding Joe Sixpack in the boonies.
We'd be better off if more food were bought and produced locally. It tastes a hell of a lot better, and doesn't ship from South America. If oil weren't so cheap, and transportation infrastructure so heavily subsidized, shipping of items that could be produced locally would be discouraged, and farms may actually be able to make enough profit to support themselves.
Of course, even neglecting the highway program that spreads people out to the sticks, there are still costs of living to consider. Relatively safe neighborhoods near the jobs are damned expensive. I am not sure that housing projects have been a good solution to that, historically. Commuting still works out better in the cost analysis, so we pave over grampa's farm and build a McMansion or twenty on it.
The model also works better in California than it does in Connecticut, where you can't grow stuff for six months out of the year. Who misses the days of starving to death if you didn't make enough jerky or if the potatoes rotted in the cellar? (Exaggerating. Maybe.)
It's interesting to observe how we've engineered our landscape. It seems inevitable that industry will tend to concentrate in infertile areas, and occupy as little area as possible. A balance will be met based on the costs of moving produce from one place to another, the cost of land, and on the required area needed to produce food.
Would we be better off if we subsidized community infrastructure instead of transportation infrastructure? If we didn't subsidize (petroleum-intensive) central farming? If we facilitated oil use less?
Tough to say. But I love the local model.
Keifus
Monday, November 06, 2006
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7 comments:
one of the interesting things, however, about the loss of agriculture in new england is this: there is now more forest than there was oh, a hundred or so years ago.
local is great, but in places like new england is it limited. not just the climate, but the soil. the bumper crop is rock, really (well, pot in VT and ME). there are some things that grow better up north: apples, for instance. tomatoes do well, as to squashes and beans. but, beyond corn, you aren't going to find any amber waves of grain.
not to discourage the local model. i like it too. but there needs to be a balance for region, climate, etc.. also, with the local model, people need to relearn to eat seasonally. that might be the largest hurdle.
also, farming does have it's own impact. there are ways of lessening it, and small scale farming is less of an impact. certain lands are not ideal for agriculture though; this is a hurdle for the local model. again, doesn't mean it should be dicouraged. but that it needs to be weighed.
You're right. I tried to get there, but didn't quite.
Would it have been better if we, as a nation, were more about community investment and less about auto transportation investment? (Or more about neither investment?) Probably.
And of course the real problem is just too damn many people. There'd be plenty of room, if it weren't for all those annoying breathers. But I'm not volunteering to cull me or mine (but I may finally get that vasectomy sooner or later).
K
aren't you glad we aren't in china? land area is about the same, yet we've got, what, a quarter of their population?
i digress. part of the problem is that america is a car culture. remember singles? trying to get the commuter train approved? sure, it's a movie, but the point is relavant: people drive everywhere. how to change that? put it on the list with transitioning to the metric system. nice to have, but someone needs to pony up and go through the transitional period.
i think something like a hub and spoke model would be ideal. what needs to be done is to develop better means of high speed public transportation. mag-lev trains, and the like. reduce the footprint of transportation lines, but increase the efficiency and speed. keep the connection of place to place whilst incouraging the sense of community within cities and towns. low-speed, pedestrian friendly transportation within communities and high-speed, efficient mass transport between them. this would also make electric cars (and the like) more feasible. the biggest knock against them has been battery life: how am i supposed to take a road trip in this thing? reduce, or eliminate that need.
switching over to electric powered transportation shifts the burden to power plants and would likely increase the pollution generated. however, centralized power production means it is easier to control pollution and to develop feasible alternative energy sources. could also lead to the development of small-scale, home use generators. consider hydrogen fuel-cells. what is keeping them back? fitting fuel storage on a car, safely. if we can encourage car use for only in community travel, then electric cars are feasible, and a personal hydrogen fuel cell (at home) can function as a generator to charge the car.
and so on. ideas, but they require at least a generation, probably two or three, to implement.
Singles, eh? Way to date yourself (and me) old man.
I don't think hydrogen is a very good solution--poor energy density and all sorts of storage problems (safety, and also a tendency to be leak-prone), but there are lots of ways around it.
I like the hub-and-spoke idea too. I've spent less time in Europe than I would like (a couple weeks in Spain when I was in high school), but urban/rural seems nicely apportioned there. Unfortunately, that continent did a pretty good job of sterilizing its ecosystem in the few centuries before the US crossed a continent. In any case, cities are nice places, and public transport between them is practical. (But you know, France booga booga!)
Here's a cool discussion on energy prospects in the near future.
the benefits i see to hydrogen hinge on using solar/wind generated power to peel it out of water. not sure on the feasiblity of it (energy input vs. energy output), but if it could be managed in a feasible way, then basically energy becomes much, much cheaper and greener.
most of the research i've heard of has been related to fuel cell cars. but, as i speculate, if cars could become the vehicle of choice for intra-city, instead of inter-city transport, then we don't have a need to focus efforts on car-size fuel cells and hydrogen storage tanks. not to mention not having to worry about crash specs, etc..
i'm thinking of it this way (and i could just be completely wrong, so bear with me). the upfront cost (equipment, etc) is certainly costly. but the brunt of the cost is in the initiation. after that, costs should decrease annually, as you don't need to buy wind and sun. using this energy to power electrolysis of water, in order to produce hydrogen is again, costly. now, if it always takes more energy to produce hydrogen this way, than one can get back from the hydrogen itself, it's obviously a bad idea. but if it's simply a matter of monies, then after the startup, you just have maintenence costs. even if the margin is very slim, it's worth it in the long run because you have nearly zero fuel cost (how much is your water bill, anyway?). not to mention that, as i understand it, the waste produced by hydrogen fuel cells is water vapor. hypothedically, a semi-closed system. if it's enough to power your house and an electric car or two, why not?
the only objection i can see is technical feasibility. that is, could just be a pipe dream. but it'd be nice if it was realizable, and would fit in well with a hub/spoke community model.
Just sayin' there're better energy storage media. Since we're talking generations anyway for this transition, you might get a lot farther with a methanol infrastructure than a hydrogen one.
(Though in that case, you'd be getting your energy from plants. Still CO2-neutral, but has all the farming issues.)
But yeah, storage is a really big issue.
K
certainly. methanol was mentioned that link you had above, in relation to using solar power to electrolzye water and get H2 then use catalysts to fix CO2 to said hydrogen and produce methanol.
the concern seemed to be producing too much electricity (hey, wasn't that the same concern they had about using niagra falls for hydroelectric power?).
as for the producing mainly electricity (solar and wind), well, transitioning to more electric powered transportation would eat up that juice, wouldn't it? i dunno, i think the idea of producing too much energy shouldn't be an impediment. if we can generate it, from renewable sources, then people will figure out a way to store it. i also think efficiency concerns somewhat lessen when the fuel is free.
PS: hey blogger, why don't you allow subscript tags? is that so fucking difficult to implement? wankers.
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