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Can We Stay in the Suburbs?
Posted by Prof. Goose on April 17, 2008 - 10:00am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: climate change, food, peak oil, self sufficiency, suburbs, united states [list all tags]
This is a guest post by Aaron Newton, who is working with coauthor Sharon Astyk on the forthcoming book, A Nation of Farmers. Aaron contributes at Groovy Green; he also blogs at Powering Down. Aaron is a land planner and garden farmer in suburban North Carolina, seeking ways to transform the current course of human land use development in an effort to prepare for the effects of global oil production peak and its outcome on automotive suburban America.
There is little doubt that during that last 60 years we here in America have transformed our manmade landscape in a way that is fundamentally different from any form of human habitation ever known. While many have flocked to this new way of organizing the spaces in which we live, critics have noticed the shortcomings and have loudly pointed them out. It’s been suggested that the development of the suburbs here in the U.S. was a really bad idea. Author James Kunstler describes suburbia as, ‘the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.’ The ability of most citizens to own and cheaply operate an automobile means we’ve had access to a level of mobility never before experienced. The outgrowth of which has been a sprawling pattern of living that changed the rules about how and where we live, work, and play and how we get there and back. We are now more spread out than ever before, mostly getting back and forth from one place to another by driving alone in our cars. This could turn out to be a really bad thing.
As the cost of fueling those cars increases, it’s becoming obvious
we’ve foolishly put too many of our eggs into one basket. And as America
wakes up to the realities of a changing climate, it’s also painfully
obvious that soloing around in a huge fleet of carbon emitters isn’t
the most thoughtful way to transport ourselves from one side of suburbia
to the other. The question is, as the expansive nature of suburban life
becomes too expensive, both economically and ecologically, what will
we do with this great ‘misallocation’ of resources?
Will we, as some suggest, simply abandon this experiment? The likelihood
of moving everyone out of suburbia and into mixed use, walkable communities
is quite remote. Likewise moving everyone from the suburbs out into
the countryside and onto farms is unlikely. To be sure many, many people
will move. Some people are already choosing to move to places where
they can safely walk and bike to meet more of their daily needs. Others
are choosing to reruralize, but completely depopulating suburban America
is a project we have neither the fiscal resources nor the fossil fuel
energy necessary to accomplish. It seems reasonable to assume that lots
of people are going to continue to live in the suburban communities
we’ve created all over this country during the last 60 years.
Will these places simply devolve into slums with roving bands of thieves
stripping building materials and other valuables from abandoned homes
and formerly homeless drug addicts burning them down while trying to
keep warm? They’ll probably be some of that especially if the housing
crisis worseness (and it will) and the government continues to address
it largely by bailing out banks. The following is from a recent article
in The Atlantic,
At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, ‘I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.’
That is to say, this is already
a problem. And with more people defaulting on their mortgages and losing
their jobs as the economy slumps we’re likely to see this scenario
play out repeatedly. But it’s important to take a moment and assess
the possibilities presented by the problem. That is, if we’re going
to do anything other than whistle while a large number of the communities
in this country turn into the slums of the 21st century,
we’re going to have to comprehensively address the problem and that
means starting with an assessment of not only the disadvantages of suburban
America but the advantages we might have in this arrangement of living.
Could the problem actually turn out to be the solution?
One of the results of a declining in the availability of oil and other
fossil fuel resources will undoubtedly be a rise in the cost of food
or even outright shortages of certain types of calories we’ve grown
accustom to acquiring quite easily. Lots of people have written about
this. It’s seems increasingly obvious that we’re going to have to
grow food differently if we have any chance of adapting to a low energy
lifestyle with any semblance of grace. Growing food means using land
for some sort of agriculture. Exactly what land we use is entirely up
to us. It’s worth noting that while David Pimentel et al have suggested
that it takes 1.8 acres of land to feed each of us now. That number
could be reduced to 1.2 acres per person while still meeting the nutritional
needs of the average American. But by 2050 we are likely to have only
0.6 acres person both because of the rise in global population and the
loss of land due to desertification, salinization and soil depletion.
In the very near future we’re not going to have enough land to feed
ourselves in the manner in which we’ve been doing so. Where will more
‘new’ land come from?
The suburbs were born out of an idea that each man could have his own
cottage in the forest, his own unmolested paradise outside of the nastys
of the industrializing cities and still go to work in those cities each
day. (Just how many of the problems we’re facing today are born out
of us wanting to both have and eat our cake?) The idea was that a man
could still earn a living in the dirty city but return to his pristine
piece of land where his wife and children could be free from pollution,
crime, brown people, noise and traffic. It never quite worked out that
way, which is to say it has, since the beginning, failed to achieve
what this experiment set out to accomplish; to
say nothing of the negative aspects of this way of developing our countryside. But nevertheless, the end result
is that a lot of people live on small amounts of land in communities
that aren’t completely paved over with asphalt and concrete. Many
of us here in this country have access to land albeit in small amounts.
This provides us with the most important resource needed to address
the rising cost of food- soil. In other words, the fact that we’ve
chopped up much of the existing farmland that once surrounded major
metropolitan areas in this country and parceled it out in fairly small
sizes to many more people ultimately may or may not prove to have been
a really bad idea. But, not only is it the hand we have now been dealt,
it might turn out to have been a fairly nifty way of developing and
maintaining a moderately democratic land ownership policy here in America.
We still have, albeit in another form and with a reduction in the quantity
and quality of soil ready for food production, a reasonable amount of
land for growing food. Again from the previously mentioned article,
Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that's roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.
What do you do with a surplus
of more than 22 million large lot homes during a period of failing industrial
agriculture and rising food costs? You establish new microfarms of course.
Those people who do continue to live in the suburbs either because they
cannot move or because they don’t want to, could feed themselves by
using this land to grow food for themselves and their neighbors. The
food could be grown largely free from fossil fuel inputs and would be
produced very close to the people who will eventually eat it. This solves
two of the really big problems associated with the industrial model
of agriculture. It provides a ready land base not for the reinstitution
of plantation style farming whereby wealthy landowners who profited
from energy descent reintroduce a horrible form of feudalism that enslaves
the former paper pushing population of America who are likely to lose
their jobs as the American economy continues to decline. No, this land
has already been subdivided into manageable parcels that could serve
as the basis for a revolution in agriculture.
Mention this idea to an ordinary citizen unaware of the prospects we
face in the near future and you’re likely to get a host of responses
about how unlikely or unreasonable such a solution might be. It’s
likely we haven’t reached the pain threshed necessary to get the real
attention of average Americans, but one response certainly will be that
we can’t grow very much food by just tearing out our lawns. This of
course isn’t true at all.
Several recent studies suggest that small scale, sustainable agriculture
is actually more productive per unit of land than industrial
farming. We’ve come to think of farming efficiency in terms
of human labor, with the adoption of the idea that the fewer people
doing it the better. But in terms of what the land can yield, we’re
better off farming it intensely on smaller plots of land and the math
is there to back up that claim. Yields can be substantial even on such
small plots as would be available to the average suburbanite. The Dervaes
family of Path
to Freedom provides
an excellent example of what is possible in our front and backyards.
They live on an urban lot of about 1/5th of an acre. They
cultivate about 1/10th of an acre or about 4,400 square feet.
That’s 67 feet X 67 feet. In other words, that’s not much land and
yet they consistently produce more than 6,000 lbs of vegetables annually.
The four adults living there eat about 85% of their vegetarian diet
from the yard during the summer months and are still able to get more
than half of what they eat out of their gardens in the winter. This
and they sell some produce to nearby restaurants. It should be noted
that they live in southern California where the weather is extremely
generous to those who growing food (and have access to water), but Eliot
Coleman and Barbara Damrosch point out in Four-Seasons Harvest: Organic
Vegetables from You Home Garden All Year Long, even people living
in Maine are capable of growing a tremendous amount and variety of nutritional,
tasty food regardless of where they live.
And let us not forget all those paper pushers I just hand pink slips
to earlier in this post. Our government and a lot of well meaning business-as-usual
types are going to put together all sorts of plans to try and reemploy
all the people who lose their jobs in the post carbon economy. There
is already talk of a kind of ‘Green Works Project Administration’
like the WPA seen during the New Deal era. At one time the WPA was the
largest employee base in the country and was designed as a way to build
up American infrastructure while reemploying those negatively affected
by the Great Depression. Such an effort now could get much needed projects
up and run in terms of new forms of energy that aren’t fossil fuel
based. To say nothing of conservation and energy efficiency projects
such as home insulation that needs to be done on a national scale. But
this or any other response that doesn’t include a large measure of
self sufficiency for the average American would be missing out on a
great opportunity to redemocratize America. It is painfully obvious
that we are at our greatest disadvantage when we are in debt to others
for the basics we need in order to survive. Growing more of our own
food in our own personal gardens, parks, school yards and community
gardens is a great way to address this problem while providing for the
nutritional shortfall likely to be experienced in the wake of the decline
of industrial agriculture.
Luckily the sun is still shining and even those of us who live in heavily
wooded neighborhoods have the option of modifying the canopy of those
trees to gain access to sunlight. The soil is still under our feet and
we can use it going forward to meet more of our food needs. The suburbs
also offer a certain amount of impervious surfaces or surfaces that
shed water. This is often a problem in many communities. The idea is
that if too many roofs tops and too many roadways shed too much water
during a rainstorm. The result is a high volume of water after a storm
that has to be diverted out of these neighborhoods before rushing into
our creeks, streams and rivers. This often leads to flooding and/or
substantial amounts of soil runoff, the number one water pollution problem
in many communities. I find it annoyingly amusing that while my county
has storm water problems to such an extent that we are under EPA mandate
to address this problem, we are simultaneously experiencing water restrictions
due to the drought in southeastern America. In other words, we have
two water problems where I live, too much water and not enough.
Is it too simple to suggest that we collect some of what we get where
it falls and use it?
The point is that the structures of suburbia- specifically rooftops
and roadways- could be used to gather the water we would need to grow
food for ourselves. This could be especially important going forward
as global climate changes throws weather curveball after curveball at
us. The solution is to designing simple, elegant ways to collect this
water for use during times between rain storms. 600 gallons of water
can be collected from 1,000 square feet of rooftop in just a 1’ rainstorm.
Many McMansions are much larger and as such have the capacity to gather
much more rain. It’s worth noting that 65% of the water we use in
our homes each day goes to irrigation, toilet flushing and laundry.
Rainwater could be used to do all three with simple filtration. Doing
this could go a long way towards restoring the health of our waterways.
In Garden Agriculture: A revolution in efficient water use, David
Holmgren notes that ‘Australian suburbs are no more densely populated
than the world’s most densely populated agricultural regions.’ Anecdotal
evidence suggests that American suburbs are populated in roughly the
same way. This suggests to me that it is at least within the realm of
possibility that the suburbs could be transformed in a way that helps
us: A) take advantage of new soil for growing food, B) foster a redemocratization
of America by offering a reasonable amount of food self sufficiency
for families during the coming era of change and volatility and C) capture
the rain water necessary to address the deepening water crisis being
experienced worldwide. We may find that in a time in which we are unable
to build out grand new responses to peak oil and climate change, agriculturally
at least, we may not have to. We might do best to just stay put.
Realistic, well-thought article.
I expect the future to be a hybrid of scenarios, some abandonment/squatting, some agricultural redevelopment and architectural re-use (Mcmansions as rooming houses/apartment buildings), some deconstruction and re-use, some burning for fuel, somethings we cannot imagine yet.
As you note, all of these options are already occurring somewhere. Edible landscapes are pretty common in my neighborhood, especially fruit trees. Plums are pretty much self-planting weeds here in Boulder. Food costs will incentivize people to convert their landscaping to something they can eat.
In years past, I have done a bit of deconstruction and a good bit of remodeling/repurposing of buildings. In capitol hill Denver, some buildings have been converted from big single-family dwellings, to apartment buildings, and back to high-end single-family since their construction around 1900.
But decaying, abandoned houses are a common sight in the exurban regions of New York and Indiana, so sometimes deconstructing and resuse is not worth the trouble.
In most of the world, the settlement pattern for agricultural villages is physical connection of houses (from Nepal to France to Mexico,etc., rows of connected houses line streets and footpaths). This provides big savings on heat, plus structural integrity, and community. Interestingly, the back-to-the-land pattern on the Oil Drum seems to be a separate house on 40 acres. Maybe some of the exurban McMansions will form the core of new agricultural villages, with the neighboring houses torn down for construction materials or fuel, and additions forming the familar rural hodgepodge of connected structures.
Edible landscapes are pretty common in my neighborhood, especially fruit trees.
Boulder CO is a remarkable place, but ultimately unrepresentative of the typical US suburban lifestyle. My edible landscape is likely in the category of far-less-than-1% of the yards here in Virginia.
Three factors are going to make it difficult to stay in Suburbia;
1. Subprime mortgages start many recent homeowners off with a major handicap, with too many people simply walking away from their homes; abandoned homes will become hideouts for transients and looters
2. Travel distance, especially for exurban. Biking, carpooling, vanpooling, and bus networks could make suburbia transportation possible, if enough people do that instead of clinging to the one-occupant auto commute.
3. 1/4 acre yards don't support a great deal of food production, especially with a house, garage, driveway taking up a goodly portion of that. If exurban 1-3 acres yards are counted, then they could have the potential to provide a substantial amount of food for the occupants, if the occupants decide to 'farm'.
Will,
To remain in suburbs most people will have to abandon the daily trips to the mall and learn to make do with what they have on hand. An average suburban lot may have anywhere from 3000 to 8000 sq. ft. of usable land that could have the majority of lawn removed and brought to plantable condition with little work.
Available fertilizers and water could be supplemented using grey water and human excrement properly composted. Getting people past the idea of using their own waste to feed their crops will be hard to accomplish but hunger is a powerful motivator. Improper composting of human waste may create to many disease outbreaks and have to be outlawed in order to prevent spread of chollera or other pathogens. Sewer treatment plants could begin composting their sludge similar to that of Milwaukee and their "Milorganite" product. Distribution on an as needed basis from the processing facility could supplement the available fertilizers to the area residents.
A typical lot if managed correctly could go a long ways to providing food sources to many of the suburban populations which could free up resources to be used for the inner cities.
I believe many layers of production will be necessary in order to prevent famine from becoming a part of our daily living.
In order to begin the move to sustainable communities many landscape firms could be selling these garden packages to residents beginning now. It is not too early to begin the shift to this and would be a great idea for some politician to seize upon as a "Return to Victory Garden" movement.
What better way to involve the general population in understanding our energy problems?
I hope we begin soon.
An average suburban lot may have anywhere from 3000 to 8000 sq. ft. of usable land that could have the majority of lawn removed and brought to plantable condition with little work.
Have you actually tried this? I've converted quite a bit of my lawn to garden, edible landscaping, and small grains, and it would not be correct to say it took "little work".
Most people will cling to their concept of how a suburban lawn should look, afraid of what the neighbors might think.
I'm all for the return to Victory Gardens, meanwhile Joe Sixpack rides around on his 28hp riding lawnmower and relaxes watching NASCAR truck races. Changing the mindset will be the toughest challenge, especially with climate change denialists and the Yergins of the world telling the Joe Sixpacks that they are on the right track, no worries.
Good "article".
Two problems that stand our are:
1.) The agriculturalization of suburbia will not generate enough revenues for those who don't already own outright, and for other necessities (e.g. heating, cooking, electricity, recreation, etc.).
2.) True enough, a desuburbanization is not likely other than many, many more becoming homeless. There is not enough walkable, urbanist environments to absorb such a migration, the lack of effective demand for the suburban properties and the premium price that walkable urban properties already command will also be prohibitive.
I think the answer may be to retrofit the drivable suburban environments to walkable urbanist ones (where necessities including food are available within walking distance to all), including the very active promotion of tele-commuting (including neighborhood facilities with fax machines, copiers, and tele-video equipment).
My considered opinion is that this can not and will not happen within the dictates of the so-called "free market". In other words, we need a planned economy.
Good luck.
Revenues? This idea is not a business idea, it is a survival technique. The point is self-reliance/sustainability. If everyone is growing the food they need, who would they be selling to?
Because they have worked so well thus far? No, what will work to distribute resources better and create a more democratic ideal is a gold standard, trade-based economy with no central banks and zero usury. When growth is not the end, then free trade can be the means to a sustainable system. As long as money/wealth is created by the charging of interest, you will have an unsustainable economy.
As this applies to food, let people grow and trade what they need. Organizing beyond the community level would be a huge error leading us back to where we are now, or where China and the USSR spent most of the last century.
Cheers
Hi CCPO,
My point was that without sufficient revenues/income, many if not most suburbanites will not be able to stay in their properties, and those who are working full-time will not be able to be food self-sufficient because of their career pre-occupations. Also, there is more to survival than growing food and I sincerely doubt that many can be self-sufficient (especially in urban and suburban environments)even in this one sphere (food).
Secondly, your knee jerk reaction to the previous failures of socialism does not preclude the idea that we would be better off if we had goals and plans for cooperative endeavors locally, regionally, and inter-regionally. The reason that America has been so successful (thus far) is more related to the rape of a virgin landscape rather than the merits of Capitalism.
Peace.
Ah, we are using different assumptions, Mike. I am always thinking in terms of where we end up, while you were speaking in terms of the transition period.
I still would think the "Victory Garden" would be used for supplementing the diet while moving to providing the entire diet as collapse gets further along. (I use collapse here not in terms of the end of civilization, but in the sense of breaking down and ending up something very different than it is now - almost certainly more localized, less regulated and possibly with federal governments that are but a shell of what they are now.)
There are people producing enough food in 4-5,000 sq ft. to keep one person fed for a year. Some homes have that much sq. footage! Turing lawns, parks, greenways and parking lots into gardens might provide enough to sustain small communities. I am doubtful this would work in large American cities. LArge cities will have o crate new ways to feed their people, depopulate, or find a way to provide value to the rural areas such that they are willing to provide food for them.
Cheers
Excellent post Aaron. I have always thought that Kunstler has overly discounted the ability of Suburban neighborhoods to beome much more food/energy independent than they are now. The widespread employment of microfarms and simple improvements to reduce energy could make make Suburbs much more viable in the future. Ofcourse some will degrade to slums, but the potential is surely there. I have a 100 sq foot garden in my saburban home that produces 150 lbs of produce per season (using mostly compost for fertilizer). It could easily be expanded to 20 times that size -- and I would have no problem transitioning my yard from ornamentals to food producers. With respect to energy I have taken steps to reduce my energy use by some 40% with only modest financial investment. I could reduce it much further with modest investment and some life style changes.
So I believe the tools are available to transform much of suburbia towards much higher sustainablity. Just have to hit the point of pain where it becomes desirable, or necessary.
Best wishes for Saburban Microfarms.
Budr
I wholeheartedly echo your comments that "I have always thought that Kunstler has overly discounted the ability of Suburban neighborhoods to become much more food/energy independent than they are now." The entire article is a good start to thinking past the dogmatism of Kunstler. One thing I did not see mentioned is the move away from flush toilets to compost toilets, which allow us to use the results to improve the land and do away with a total waste of water (IMHO). Another point to consider is that the suburbs of the last 60 years were not the first time we had "suburbs" with living spaces widely separated from each other: in the "old" West, each family had a homestead and went into town once a month or even once a year (by horse). I prefer the city and a small patch of land as I once had in Denver, but lots of other people could manage from the suburbs, small local villages. Anyway, good article.
The only difference being that the homesteaders weren't commuting to work every day. The idea of suburbs is not that living spaces are widely separated. Instead, it's the idea that a person can live far from work, so that they don't have to wake up in a noisy, dirty city.
Living in New Jersey, suburbs are pretty much the rule. There are various levels of suburbia though. Most of the older developments near the city are pretty crowded. They might sit on 1/10 to 1/4 of an acre. Fortunately, the houses aren't too big, but the yards are still small, and if you happen to be on the wrong side of the street most of the land that could be a garden is shaded. The middle aged developments tend to be sited on larger parsels of land and are farther from city centers. They usually sit on 1/2 to 1 acre of land. Shade still plays a big factor in how much of the property is actually usable, but not as badly as with the older houses unless they happen to have a number of trees. The newer developments go one of two ways depending upon the zoning laws for the town. First, they can be even more crowded than the older developments. The houses almost universally have 1/10 acre plots and a huge footprint for the house. It's not uncommon to have 3500 sq. ft. houses on tiny parsels of land. The other trend is monster houses on 3-5 acres of land.
Barring other factors, the owners of the monster houses might have a chance of growing enough food (minus grains) for a normal sized family. Unfortunatley, one of the first things that developers do when preparing a build site is to bulldoze off all of the top soil and replace it with sod. The other types of suburbia don't stand a chance of growing a reasonable amount of food with the land they have. Limited space and shade from trees and, more importantly, the very house that we're trying to save get in the way.
In the absence of a robust transportation network that can move enormous amounts of food from where its grown to where its eaten, the suburbs (at least in New Jersey) simply won't work. The Green Revolution has allowed us to pave over and build on what used to be very good growing land, and it's going to be very difficult to get it back into use.
What a great article by Prof Goose. Thanks for sharing.
On getting to and from the suburbs in a post peak world, we are going to need a lot more battery electric vehicles. I just turned over 2400 miles on my EV this morning on the way to work. http://www.evalbum.com/1414
I am currently working on a 4 wheel BEV and it should be on the road soon. We can not wait for Detroit to solve our transportation problems. They are reacting way to slowly.
The part about growing food on small lots and the comments about rainwater reminded me of this page that I read recently. http://www.wordpress.peakmoment.tv/conversations/?p=11
This fellow has a really good system for storing rainwater. It appears that it could be used by many people.
Kyle
http://www.zevutah.com
Kyle,
Wow!
Your ZEV Ninja is very cool! From what I read you can do around 10 miles at ~20-50 mph on the battery before recharging. That's pretty good IMHO. In case I missed it, could you post a bit more on charging and range.
I've been skeptical of batteries, EVs but I want to hear more good news on that front.
Thanks for the post.
The Th!nk seems to be the first practical EV car to hit the market:
http://www.gizmag.com/ukp14000-thnk-city-electric-car-ready-for-showroom...
the first models are due for release in Noway this spring, which will allow better evaluation.
The Lectric Ninja has done 45 miles on a single charge. This was at moderate speeds around town. If you go top speed of 55 all the time the range will be proportionally less.
I rode the bike to work twice this week. Hopefully the weather will allow more riding soon. This bike was built in about 90 days of spare time. After work I plug it into a solar charge station on the roof of my work shop.
BEV's are available today. You just have to be willing to build your own. This is why the big three will become minor players in the near future as Th!nk and Tesla lead us to the future.
Israel and Denmark will lead also with Project Better Place and USA will play catch up as usual.
Hello all,
Here are my two cents on this. It would be nice to be able to have a transition as so, but in my view the problem underlaying this, is that most people are living in homes that are owned by banks. Therefore if they lose their jobs in the downside of the hubbert's curve, they will be evicted and then be unable to grow their own food (as said in Dimitry Orlov paper). But on the other hand, if the forecloses are bad enough the banks might be incline to let the people stay in place rather than having to manage an oversized inventory.
An other question I have is relevant to the actual square footage needed to grow enough food per person. The houses are bigger but most of the time the lots have not grown in accordance, leaving less free space to grow anything. An to conclude, there is dirt and soil, I mean the guality of soil needed to grow astroturf is not the same needed to grow food. Just having enough space does not garanty in my view the yields that could substain a person for a full year, I here I say nothing of all thoses folks stuck in marshes and deserts without any logical prospect of growing anything. But here, I am no agronomist, just a poor undergraduate student in business administration.
Lets hope the best in anycases.
After decades of organic amendments, I've managed to improve my garden soil. The pH is lower by about 1 point, I've increased NO3-N from single to double digits ppm, increased P by nearly an order of magnitude, improved tilth & water holding capacity, and most especially have increased micronutrient content substantially. I've accomplished this without benefit of commercial fertilizers & amendments. But it's been an awful lot of work. Harvesting & hauling the raw materials for making compost is labor intensive. Fortunately I've had two strong sons to help but they are grown now & have their own lives. How many other suburbanites/ semi-rural dwellers have done any of this? I see bagged leaves, lawn clippings, pruning slash, and other compostable materials routinely stacked by the road to be hauled to the landfill. What percentage of people have made the effort to improve their soil? 1%? 5%?
It's a pipe dream to think that people are going to be able to feed themselves on ex-suburban plots of land. The work is hard, the harvest sparse. I can grow all my own produce and eggs, but I'm hardly self-sufficient for staple cereal grains. Very few could even produce what I do on their depauperate soils. If people become forced by circumstance to grow all their own food, tens of millions are going to starve. Starving people become desperate. They will raid the gardens of those who actually can grow some of their own food, and will kill those who try to defend their gardens. Get real.
There is a lot of room on the continuum from "doomer" to "cornucopian".
Plenty of people already garden on suburban and exurban land. As food and transport costs increase, the nature of the suburbs will change, and food growing, remodeling, and repurposing will happen incrementally. Neighborhood stores which did not make economic sense at $1.20 gallon will make more economic sense at $3.50 a gallon,etc. So maybe the day will come when people "will kill those who try to defend their gardens", but people all over the world today live with incomes 10 or 100 times lower than current US average, and they do not kill each other for their gardens. So a future more like the US before 1930 is certainly possible, where almost everybody gardened at least a little, but the majority of food still came from farming rather than gardening.
When I read comments like "Get Real", I think that the scenario of houses surrounded by food gardens is already "real" for half the inhabitants of the planet, while the "killing those who try to defend their gardens" is only real for a tiny and unfortunate minority in Darfur and other desparate places. Does "real" refer to what is actually happening and likely to happen, or does it refer to a specific fantasy or prediction of the future, not buttressed by any evidence?
I don't know. Does it? Are YOU totally self-sufficient for food and fuel on a suburban plot of land? Or are your objections to my post based on "a specific fantasy or prediction of the future, not buttressed by any evidence?"
I actually am self-sufficient for fuel wood, and for vegetables & eggs. I also provide some fruit for my own needs, and could harvest rabbits, squirrels, quail & feral cats from my property, should I choose to eat meat. I can't provide staple cereal grains for myself, let alone commodities such as citrus, coffee, sugar, etc. Are you even as semi-self-sufficient as I am, in these terms? If not, then you're a hypocrite for criticizing my post. Let's see you do better, then I may think you know what you're talking about.
Where was "self-sufficiency" even proposed?
Converting suburbs to produce more food and be better adapted to a post-peak world does not imply self-sufficiency at all to me. My interest is more in the incremental changes that will occur and those that are already occurring. I have never met a "self-sufficient" human and I do not expect to.
My objection was to the combination of "Get Real" and "killing" to protect their gardens. That scenario is certainly possible, but to my mind is so distant, given the huge margins between current US consumption and actual human requirements, that "real" is the last word that I would choose to describe it.
It depends on how bad the collapse is
If it is relatively mild then some kind of victory garden approach as a supplemental (not primary) food source is entirely likely to occur.
If the collapse and associated anarchy is at all bad, well most collapse, even partial collapse, in history has been hell on farmers. Check out the 30 years war in 17th century Germany as one example.
The key factor in my mind is whether a functioning government survives, one capable of maintaining law and order. If law and order are maintained, then yeah for the gentleman farmer. If law and order fail, then the scavenging mob is the winner.
Another observation, no government is likely to be able to remain functional in the event of true starvation of a substantial portion of it's population.
I agree with TommyVee - this exaggerated "self sufficiency" meme seems almost uniquely North American, maybe add in parts of Australia, Siberia - big continental areas with a migration history where self reliance became more prominent. But in the US, anyway, it's been hyped by the western genre in movies and literature, distorting the western experience almost beyond recognition.
Investing in social capital is the basic game plan for our species, and I don't see why that won't prevail generally as economic contraction intensifies (albeit with some turbulence, I agree).
Reminds me of a "Food Days" Conference that I helped organize in 1976.
We were in Amherst Massachusetts and regarding the local and regional area, we first decided to call the Conference, "Self-Sufficiency".
Then someone said, "That would be ridiculous (remember we were in Massachusetts), why don't we call it "Towards Self-Sufficiency"". Everybuddy agreed, and we went on from there and had a successful conference at least judging by the attendance. Judging by the trends towards more suburban and exurban development since the conference, the ideas presented obviously did not take root. We are still facing myopic development, converting farmlands into lawns, etc.
We need to clarify when talking about moving towards agricultural self-sufficiency in metropolitan regions whether we mean personal or societal self-sufficiency. Moving towards this goal is pertinent to both, particularly in regions with large concentrations of urban and suburban environments.
Mike,
Sounds like you were concerned about limited resources and a trend in living style that did not fit your world view 32 years ago.
Then you were socializing with like minded folk at community conferences, and now you're doing it here on the net.
Topics like this one (article above) I file as "oracles of the coming doom" beside overpopulation, global cooling, nuclear winter, ozone depletion and global warming.
I've formed the impression (not wanting to push too far here) that you might have spent time moving from one humanity-induced doom oracle to the next.
You're older than I am. I am curious about how your opinions have evolved with time.
The evidence seems to have always implied disaster, but the scenarios seem never to pan out...
The main point of Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" was that many sucessful civilizations eventually failed because they did not foresee impending resource constraints.
I think modern man has very little sense of how short a time 150 years (Ind. Rev.) is, and even less awareness of how short a time 80 - 100 (oil-ominated industry) years is.
Previous collapses have often occurred, depending on how you define the period of collapse, over decades (British Empire) or hundreds of years (Maya, Rome). Some happen "over night" due to strong outside forces. (Inca)
If we are headed for a major collapse, we are just getting started. The industrial age has been but a blink.
Cheers
I would agree that gardening is a lot harder than it looks. There is also the issue of what kind of jobs can people hold - will there be sufficient transportation to get to them work? WIll jobs be available?
Will jobs be available?
The uncertainty is amazing. My best guess is jobs will mirror the current bipolar inflation/deflation of finances. If you are in a primary value-added job (farmer, food processing, transportation) you will be much better off than service jobs (insurance sales, bankers, etc...).
The spikes of uncertainty will be enormous. These can be modulated somewhat by aggressive leadership; if we have hope, we can endure more uncertainty. It would be nice to see:
Objectives- Churn society
- Strengthen social fabric
- Distribute crisis organizational skills
- Teach gardening and defense
Peak Oil's consequences will be global, but the solution is local; self-reliance.
It might be helpful to have a persistent section of TOD that lists local solutions and links to other resources.
"After decades of organic amendments, I've managed to improve my garden soil."
That's hopelessly pessmistic.
I've managed to improve the productivity of my soil by about three times over four years by reading and learning how to compost well.
The internet has been a HUGE source of information.
This year I made my own terra preta out of burned black toast and compost. We'll see how that works out.
The average person could be TOLD how to improve their soil by a resident expert. And I think the percentage of the population doing backyard farming is much higher than you think. In my immediate neighborhood there are four people growing at least some vegetables. My immediate neighbor who thinks I'm a crazy hippy dude will soon be doing it because his daughter has been influence by my two sons who have told her that vegetables from the store are full of nasty chemicals. She now has asked her grampa who grows his own vegetables to help her make a little vegetable plot.
The meme is spreading.
It depends on where you live and what the soil was like to begin with. Here, the pH of unamended soil is about 8.2 and it contains <1% organic matter. Some improvement is made in the first few years by amending with compost & spading in cover crops, but it literally requires decades to turn this "soil" into anything resembling the rich mollisols of the N American Midwest.
Yes, many people garden as a hobby. Doing so provides recreation, modest exercise & improves human nutrition a little bit. But these suburban hobby gardens are a FAR cry from becoming totally food self-sufficient, especially in a scenario where fossil fuel & commercial fertilizer inputs are unavailable. Sans the garden tractor &/or rototiller, many of these hobbyist gardeners wouldn't bother. And without the pickup to haul compostable materials, it would be nigh on impossible to provide sufficient homegrown amendments to improve soil quality significantly. This is especially true in the suburbs, where lots typically were bladed down to subsoil before construction began, and where accessible compostable biomass is a long way off.
Knowledge about how to grow food is readily available, as you state. But growing sufficient food to support a family is HARD WORK. Under a scenario where families are forced by necessity to feed themselves, it's entirely reasonable to assume that others would become likewise motivated by hunger to rip off the fruits of the labors of others. The vision of happy cooperative suburbanites becoming food & fuelwood self-sufficient is unrealistic in the utter extreme. I repeat: Get real.
Wow, getting anything to grow on that is a huge victory.
The "Dig for Victory" campaign in Britain during WWII was both realistic and successful:
More on Dig for Victory on the BBC web site
Interesting article.
Beware of combining these two. Chickens are stupid about most things, but they sure as hell know when vegetables are ripe - usually before you do. Free ranging chickens are not really an option where a close-coupled garden is concerned (and by close coupled, I mean within about 1/4 mile). Because they will find your vegetables, and they will peck the crap out of them. Learning this by experience is a real downer.
While future Victory type gardens might help us out there is something to say about economies of scale. Even a small organic farm will beat the productive crap out of any suburban lot. I find it peculiar that people fantasize about self sufficiency by growing food in suburbia--but just about no one can grow enough food in a suburban lot for himself. Also people fantasize about being energy self sufficient so they install solar water heaters and panels even though the EROE(&$)I is terrible. But at the same time I don't see these same people trying to make homemade washing machines or refrigerators. Nor are these people attempting to make homemade computer chips for their homemade computers. I grow a big garden every year--but like everyone I am dependent on the outside world's productive economies of scale for computers, energy and food.
Kudos for the clear post !
ELP requires some critical pathways if you will. Sort of like the major arteries. Bust those and the bottom is the limit. ELP does not mean hide out and grow your own food it means identifying the critical and important trades and ensuring they don't go the way of the nail salon or botox boutique.
In many cases the same people that are advocating gardening dismiss the internet yet we have this huge ignorant populace that needs education.
You cant reject computers/internet and assume some sort of organic nirvana will happen. We have to have both.
"Economies of scale" depend on local conditions, and what kind of food you're talking abotu.
With food-growing, this is what we find,
- small-scale farming has low resource use, but high labour use, and is very productive in yield per area.
- large-scale farming has high resource use, but low labour use, and is moderately productive in yield per area.
So in the Third World resources are expensive and labour is cheap; they have lots of small-scale farming. In the West resources are cheap and labour is expensive; we have lots of large-scale farming.
As fossil fuels and thus other resources become more scarce, their price will rise, making resources expensive, so that small-scale farming becomes relatively more cost effective.
However, I would expect that some kinds of farming will remain large-scale, specifically large monocultures. If you have miles and miles of wheat, then even if fuel is $20 a gallon that combine harvester looks much more effective than a dozen guys out there with scythes. But the fruit orchard or cabbage field, where machinery doesn't operate so well, human labour will become more cost effective at some point.
And of course, if you just can't get the fossil fuels, artificial fertilisers and so on at any price, then many people will have to go back to that.
It's physically possible to grow half a tonne of fruit and vegetables in a year on 30m2/330ft2 of garden beds, or 42mm2/450ft2 with paths; I know this claim of my vegie garden book to be true because I've done a scaled-down version of it on one-third the area, getting a proportionate yield. The full version will entirely feed one person, or provide the complement to grains and legumes for 2-4 people, and take a weekend to set up, and about 90 minutes of work each week. No fancy chemicals or "unique" techniques are needed, it's very old-style. Farm labourers in 17-19th century England used to be lent cottages with gardens to grow all their vegies, and they often weren't much larger than that.
Nonetheless, I think that grain and legume production will remain largely as it is for the foreseeable future. It's the fruit and vegies that'll matter.
About livestock and thus dairy, it's harder to say. Rises in prices of fossil fuels and derivatives are already flowing on to grain prices, and will thus flow on to confined feedlot livestock. As the meat:grain price ratio rises, we can expect people to eat less meat.
More of that in the shape of food to come.
A couple of comments, firstly comparing the position in the UK.
Gardens here are usually small, and so not a lot of food could be grown there, but OTOH quite a few have allotments and already grow substantial amount of their food, but that amounts to a fairly small proportion of the population at present.
We also have the model of what happened in the 2nd World war which would likely be dusted off.
Land for more allotments is limited in cities, but parks etc would probably be converted, and substantial areas could be made available on the fringes of cities, and folk would bike or catch a bus to them.
The land is currently being farmed, so soil fertility issues should not be huge, but productivity would be much greater under high labour input allotment-style cultivation.
Localisation of offices would probably occur, as people in the further out suburbs would find it difficult to get into the city centres to work.
Out-of-town malls would be in trouble, and would likely try providing buses to people in their catchment area to pull them in, but I doubt that strategy would be sustainable.
My other comment is on the assertion that solar residential thermal suffers for poor EROE and I.
I don't see how you figure that.
Some units are fairly expensive, especially in rip-off Britain, but at it's simplest all you are doing is putting a water container on your roof and siphoning the water off after the sun has heated it.
You can even build do-it-yourself rigs.
Even in the UK this can provide over 50% of hot water needs.
In hot areas you have the added benefit that the area under the collector is cooled.
In France even though they have substantial amounts of nuclear power they plan to install over 5 million solar thermal systems in the next few years, and in cost-conscious China they are massively successful.
Duplicate post
I don't disagree that it's hard work but I also don't think we're going to see a sudden collapse to a situation where people have to all of a sudden start trying to feed themselves from the backyard. It will be a gradual burn where the meme will spread.
As for compostable material there is tons of it available.
Newspaper, Nail Clippings, Vaccuum Cleaner dust, Cardboard, Lawn Clippings, Kitchen Scraps etc. Even in a high efficiency situation where people are half starving, there is food waste that makes excellent compost: chicken bones, cartilage, fruit kernels, orange peel, seeds etc etc.
I think you are being way too pessimistic.
I bet most suburban houses have enough compostable material in the basement or garage to provide at least a couple inches without having to go to parks and grab twigs and leaves etc.
Maybe there is more than one way to grow food?
Maybe its not hard work?
Maybe it can be done in a small place?
Here are two videos (15 mins) showing other solutions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt2qDOwxiUU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2YZhVvFPUc&feature=related
One aspect often neglected is that in times of crisis people suffer most from their loss of status in society.
While theoretically possible to see some suburbs morphed into small garden plots, I wonder how the average white-collar employee may react to a changing paradigm. I don't fear so much an increase in violence, although domestic violence will probably be the first result, but rather an apathetic slide toward depression, and expectations of BAU returning ASAP. Contemporary politicians will push that message as their status is directly threatened by this new model of society.
Soils are not equal everywhere and it may take more than possible to retrofit some areas. Also it takes communities, and not isolated individual families, to organise and do the work.
Besides, what's the physical condition of most people in the US now? Obesity is rampant and being gym-fit is not being farm-fit, to say the least.
Do you mean that being able to tie your shoelaces without sitting down is not the same as picking lettuce for 8 hours?
See my post downthread - not everyone will be growing their own food, those that are good at it and have the time and physical strength will sharecrop all the other land. Thus, all those people will be getting SOME food from their own land, and it would be pretty stupid of them to kill the people that are growing it for them.
Soil quality is a bigger issue, and you are right, it does take time to really build the soil up. As you point out, though, a lot of stuff that can make perfectly good compost or mulch is presently just being thrown away. Throw some poultry, rabbits, goats, and maybe even pigs into the suburban mix and you've got some manure to improve the soil pretty quickly.
I think the thing we need to keep in mind here is that we are unlikely to face a scenario where one minute everyone is able to supply 100% of their food from the grocery store, and the next minute they are going to have to supply 100% of their food from their own gardens. More likely, we are going to see an inexorable financial squeeze on people. It might not even be so much a matter of food prices going up so much as it is of energy and other essentials going up even more, forcing people to economize on their food budgets. The place to begin is with vegies and fruits; having a higher water content than grains, they are more perishable and heavier to transport, so it is going to make more sense to grow those yourself and leave your shrinking food budget increasingly dedicated to buying grains and other stuff that makes less sense (or is impossible) to grow yourself.
Very good post. I agree with you. I support people's efforts to provide food for themselves. Going from 0% to 5% food self-sufficiency is progress. I agree that fossil fuels won't become unavailable overnight. The more that people can do to improve soil quality & grow a portion of their own food the better. I agree that community cooperation is a good thing. My point is that it's stochiometrically impossible for tens of millions of suburbanites to feed themselves lacking fossil fuel & commercial fertilizer inputs. And under a scenario where such inputs are lacking, those who can come the closest to self-sufficiency will only become targets for starving hordes lacking the means for feeding themselves.
In the meanwhile by all means acquire what skills & tools you can. Learn to grow as much food for yourself as you can. But when TS really HTF, it won't matter much how good a gardener you are. As the social order deteriorates we're all fuckered.
Manure stinks and will not be amenable to direct raising and application to urban and suburban plots.
I built a composting bin on my father's suburban property (he and I both had small food garden plots on his largely grass laden holding)about thirty years ago and was composting table scraps as well as grass clippings. I returned from a month-long job in the Bahamas only to find that my father had torn down and thrown out my compost bin.
"Why did you do that", I complained.
"It stank".
To do the organic thing in the urban and suburban settings will take cooperation with property holders in the more rural hinterlands.
Compost, handled right, does not stink. It needs to have enough O2 to keep the process aerobic. If it goes anaerobic, then you get a big mess of slime that does indeed stink. It's easy to fix by just turning the pile every couple of days or getting a composter that allows O2 into the pile.
This is right. If your compost stinks you're doing it wrong.
It's usually a bad mix of greens and browns that causes it to stink but as the above poster states, simply sticking a spade in it to let it aerate every couple of days gives the little critters enough of a boost to be able to eat right up any stink.
Composted humanure and kitchen waste will do more in a short period of time than simply using leaf and grass clipping mulch (which are helpful in their own right). Nitrogen is important, but potash and phosphorus also are needed.
Please read the "Humanure Handbook" to gain a better understanding.
Get real.
I agree in the most part. Inertia will keep people from even trying until the "Really Need To" then it is too late.
It's a loooooong time from the first spring planting, to the first harvest.
From the time people get the idea to "Have a Large Garden" until they actually get enough even to can and put up for winter is not a couple of weeks.
It could be a couple of years. That Killer late frost wipes some out.
Discovering how to deal with insect pests. Time taken to turn a "CHEMLAWN" type sterle "Beautiful" lawn to an productive Organic garden more than a few weeks.
Sit in front of Walmart for a half hour in a so-so part of town and look at the people. I mean REALLY look at the people.
Do you really think the majority are ready for that level of a game?
Sad but true! Americans sense of entitlement will be our undoing.
I've said it before but I'll repeat it: It would take Khmer Rouge style tactics with a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects to get Americans to start growing food.
It's amazing what public executions, starvation and forced labor will do for motivation!
Yep. It is amazing what trying to do that kind of crap does in a country that is pretty well armed. I would imagine that TPTB would find themselves facing an angry populace out to introduce them to executions, starvations, and forced labor.
You must have been adding amendments with a teaspoon. My spouse and I gardened on an urban 1/3 acre lot in Asheville, NC over a period of 14 years. The 30'x30' garden plot started out as hardpan clay. By the 3rd year, after a couple of pickup loads of manure each year, and sprinkling of rock phosphate, we had what I would call 'good' garden soil with a fair amount of tilth and crawling with earthworms. By the 5th year it was primo.
The main problem I see with lots of suburban dwellers beginning to garden like this is a developing scarcity for organic amendments. People will be scrounging every bit of organic matter available and in many cases there won't be enough to go around.
ET,
I've had a really long day mowing in our orchard, cutting firewood and a few other projects and I get grumpy so I shouldn't be posting. But...
The assumption, if I've read the initial post reasonably well, is that people will begin to grow a lot of their own food out of necessity. As I posted down thread, to me this means society is collapsing since few people really want to do this...or they would be doing it already.
You say, "By the 3rd year, after a couple of pickup loads of manure each year, and sprinkling of rock phosphate,..." OK, let's look at this. You've got fuel to drive your pickup truck to a place with organic material and back. My guess is that is likely to be horse manure and bedding but it could be goat (Goat goes for around $35 a pickup in a town south of me.) or some other animal. There is manure because they could also purchase bedding and feed. Pushing the horse thing, if people must produce food of necessity, how many are going to be able to buy feed for their pets...and that's what most horses are these days.
Now on to rock phosphate. Ugh! Again, as I mention down thread, it isn't just P but also K, Ca and trace elements. If people are so strapped that they have to grow their own food, how in the heck can they afford to buy these nutrients? And, I fully agree that there won't be enough organic matter to go around.
This leads me to the end of this rant: Neither Biodynamics nor Permaculture are sustainable. They take nutrient materials from one place and move it to another and call it sustainable. Bullshit. Being grumpy and tired, I'm leaving out why I know this is the case.
Todd
Human life isn't sustainable in the long term, eventually we will go extinct. The trick is to make that later rather than sooner. For that matter, life on earth is not sustainable; some day the sun will expand and the oceans boil off and that will be that. In the meantime, life goes on.
Human beings are exceptional in that we have intelligent brains. We've figured out that we can move organic materials from one place to another, put plants in that place, and get more food than we would if we just hunted and gathered whatever sustainable Mother Nature happened to provide. That's why most of us aren't in hunter/gatherer mode any more. When there are no longer any brainy humans around to move organic amendments around to where they are needed, then of course that form of food production will no longer be sustained. Until that point arrives, I think I have more pressing things to worry about.
Leanan has two good links about this subject on Drumbeat today.
From "Out of the Yard and Onto the Fork" in the NY Times...
"During World War I, to save fuel and labor, President Woodrow Wilson had sheep grazing on the White House lawn. His wife, Edith, planted vegetables to inspire the Liberty Garden campaign, in which thousands of students, called “Soldiers of the Soil,” grew their own food in their schools and communities, she said. As the Allied powers began to win, the name Liberty Garden was changed to Victory Garden.
Just after Pearl Harbor, Ms. Hayden-Smith said, another Victory Garden campaign was started. Eleanor Roosevelt grew peas and carrots on the White House lawn, and by the end of the war, Ms. Hayden-Smith said, “Americans were producing 40 percent of the country’s produce” in their gardens."
and from "Feeding the Suburbs"
"What struck me as I read through the articles was the statistic “85% of all farms worldwide are smaller than five acres” (15). "
So this gives some idea of the potential that was realized during 4 years of war and the potential for farming small plots. In Nepal and Latin America, I noticed that highway medians, verges, vacant lots, etc. are used for pasture as a minimum, while in the US we "cultivate" massive acreage of grass that we then burn fuel to mow, irrigate, and fertilize.
I also have improved my soil over decades. Probably composting toilets/outhouses would be the fastest way to build soil quality in former suburbs, and that would not be too hard to arrange...
Excellent Post Proffessor Goose!
There is an excellent article that was in the Atlantic Monthly a couple of months ago titled: "Suburbs - The Next Slum?":
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime
"Pent-up demand for urban living is evident in housing prices. Twenty years ago, urban housing was a bargain in most central cities. Today, it carries an enormous price premium. Per square foot, urban residential neighborhood space goes for 40 percent to 200 percent more than traditional suburban space in areas as diverse as New York City; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.
It’s crucial to note that these premiums have arisen not only in central cities, but also in suburban towns that have walkable urban centers offering a mix of residential and commercial development. For instance, luxury single-family homes in suburban Westchester County, just north of New York City, sell for $375 a square foot. A luxury condo in downtown White Plains, the county’s biggest suburban city, can cost you $750 a square foot. This same pattern can be seen in the suburbs of Detroit, or outside Seattle. People are being drawn to the convenience and culture of walkable urban neighborhoods across the country—even when those neighborhoods are small."
What is also interesting to point out is that the current crop of urban professionals, raised on 'Seinfeld' and 'Friends', want to live in a hip walkable community where they can hang with their pals. I really can't see anything short of The Killing Fields getting Gen-Xers to rise to the chore of growing food. Try and get your kids to take out the trash for chrissake!
I see a danger in people turning to the central government for answers. Let's not forget that is how we got in the predicament we're in now.
I live in Oceanside CA, a medium sized city in N. San Diego County. About 18 years ago the city rezoned the downtown to high density and established efficient BART-like rail transport, as well as a walkable community. On Thursdays they close off the civic center and have a Farmer's Market and it is packed.
In the last couple of years San Diego's real estate market has taken a nose-dive but one bright spot has been Oceanside. There are dozens of new developments that are growing around the downtown area and being filled as soon as they're available.
The new mantra should be "think local". Politics that should count are your city councils. At least if you have a problem you can actually get face to face with those cheesy parasites. I think looking to Hillary/Obama/McCain for answers is a bleak prospect. IMO the sooner the U.S. governtment collapses the better.
Everyone thinks of agriculture in 2D, and on giant commercial scales it must be. But plants only use the topsoil, and multiple levels of plantings can be stacked and terraced into outdoor racks or in a greenhouse. In fact, in some cases this is advantageous because some crops do better when shaded from the sun during the hottest parts of the day, and the raised terrace boxes can be arranged to block the sun at times.
A much bigger issue is water, especially in the southwest. There is no way someone in suburban Las Vegas or Phoenix is going to be growing anything without lots of water input from elsewhere. Rainwater capture is nowhere near enough for most crops.
As a side note, and I know this is irrelevant when things get really bad, it is illegal to collect rainwater from your roof in Colorado, and I suspect most western states, since they all seem to have used the same water law as a template. Water falling from the sky belongs to someone else. It is also illegal to use well water for anything other than indoor domestic use, unless you have a well permit issued before the mid-70's, or it is a specifically permitted ag well. You can't even legally water a domestic animal or outdoor flower box or garden with well water. A few years ago, there was a crackdown on people with gardens and horses. They were told to buy cisterns and have them filled by a local water hauler, or face fines. It goes without saying that you cannot legally even dip a bucket in a nearby creek to water anything.
I'm gonna get hit for this one but here goes. Regarding Las Vegas or Phoenix maybe just maybe in a Post Peak world and being a huge net energy importer, IT IS A TERRIBLE IDEA TO LIVE IN A DESERT!
I don't disagree in general--there is potential to produce a far higher % of one's needs off 1/4 acre outside Portland than outside Phoenix. However, that doesn't mean that even in Phoenix it isn't possible to provide a significant portion of one's food. Take a look at Brad Lancaster's Rainwater Harvesting for theory on how to do this, and a good concrete example of an individual (the author) who raises a very significant amount of food from a 1/4 acre lot in suburban Tucson (admittedly, with 12" of rain, more than Phoenix or LV). If, by growing regionally appropriate foods and intelligent use of rainwater, this is possible in the desert, it is very realistic (though not necessarily easy) in most other locations.
Quick comment on the rainwater harvesting note: it is my understanding that it is expressly legal in some states (e.g. Arizona), and questionably illegal in others. Colorado (probably the most restrictive) is governed by the "prior appropriation" doctrine, the basis of water law in most of the West. That means that when someone downstream has established a claim on water first, they have priority over those upstream in the same watershed. This has the potential to give rise to a claim against an upstream user who "harvests" rainwater because, to the extent that the use of this rainwater is going (eventually) into storm drains, or transpiring through plants it waters, it may not reach the holder of the prior appropriated claim. HOWEVER, to my knowledge (I live in Colorado), no individuals in suburbia have ever been sued on this theory. Lots of people (including myself) direct water from their roof to water fruit trees, or use mulch to retain water in certain places, and I have not heard of any claims against that kind of use. That doesn't mean they wouldn't succeed--but it seems that the cost of bringing them, and the cost of proving that my mulch and fruit trees is actually impacting the water available to a downstream user, outweighs the benefit of bringing such a claim. The only time I've ever heard of this becoming a significant issue was when a fairly large building in downtown Denver wanted to install a green roof, and the degree of transpiration (effectively taking water from a downstream user) became significant enough to cause a problem. I'm not by any means a specialist in water law, this is just my experience from taking a passing interest in this topic in Colorado.
It's also worth noting that prior appropriation originates in common law, and any state legislature can pass a statute expressly authorizing suburban homeowners to harvest and store rainwater.
Jeffv-
The last failed attempt to live in the Salt River area of Arizona (Phoenix) resulted in the inhabitants resorting to cannibalism. The area has never been successfully inhabited for very long periods.
As far as for Los Angeles (my birth place), the LA basin can support 100, 000 people with the available water supply, and reasonably intact environment in the San Gabriel Mountains. LA county currently has 8 million people, many that could not identify the end of a shovel. I'm horrified and fascinated every time I venture back to LA, once a area of immense agricultural riches, now a post modern wasteland, something Gibson would find disturbing.
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No disagreement, really...but there is one thing that these places have that might be useful - sunlight. Potentially established with combined infrastructure with Alan's rail electrification plans, the deserts could be a source of energy. Best as far as I could tell through solar thermal generation, and distributed through HVDC could provide a large source of energy for the entire country. The population to service these systems would likely be a very minute fraction of the existing population.
I learned recently that it's illegal to collect rainwater in Durango, CO, & some other municipalities in the US Southwest, but was under the impression that this varied from place to place. If the issue goes back to Western water allocation laws in general, this opens a real can of worms. I just asked a coworker about this & he said that you may be right. I was told that there are ways around the law and that the law is rarely enforced. For instance, while it may be illegal to collect rain in barrels & cisterns, it's not illegal to "harvest" rainwater by means of contoured landscaping, with berms to retard runoff & promote water infiltration. If the law against collecting rainwater in holding tanks isn't currently enforced this doesn't mean that it won't be, as water becomes more scarce. If all this is true, why not take it to its logical conclusion and insist that by allowing plants to transpire water on one's property, one is illegally diverting water belonging to downstream users? I wouldn't be surprised to hear of a court case along these lines, before long.
The situation is a real mess. What constitutes "beneficial use," for instance. I don't regard the irrigation of alfalfa as a beneficial use, since people don't have to eat beef. A carnivore, on the other hand, might not consider my irrigation of Siberian elms (a widely considered "weed" tree) a beneficial use. Yet I heat my home primarily with elm wood, a beneficial use to me indeed. Personally, I would say that the most beneficial thing that can be done with water is to leave it in the stream, where it can support lotic & riparian ecosystems. Doing so, however, can result in the loss of the water right, under the "use it or lose it" policy.
You're right tho; water law becomes irrelevant if things get really bad.