City Hall every night. While we sleep milions of trucks deliver billions of pounds to thousands of wholesale and supermarket warehouses. Fruits and vegetables reach us from California's Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys, from Florida, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Mexico and Central and South America. Local milk and eggs refrigerate here with slaughtered western steer. Fish from the Pacific and Atlantic flop ashore. The system never rests, delivering the greatest variety of eats for the least paycheck, any place on earth. From high above, our machines and trucks and toilers would look like blood cells racing through an athlete. We are fed so well we can live preoccupied with careers, romance, God, homes, sex, families and thrills. As the cartoon shows, metals and fuels forge tools which raise food. The food we buy has survived bugs, birds, weeds, diseases, erosion, drought, flood, poison, harvest, storage, trimming, crushing, mixing, cooking, packaging, spoilage, more storage, and transport to wholesalers and then markets, to be swallowed by us. But there are problems in heaven. American cities have become armies camped far from their sources of supply, using distant natural resources faster than these renew. For example, although Los Angeles was once the greatest garden in the world, producing more food between 1910 and 1950 than any county in the United States, it now imports most food from hundreds and thousands of miles away. Gigantic local orchards, farmlands and grasslands were paved for the region's latest crop: people. Every day thousands additional Americans arrive, each wanting as much food as you, yet each day eight square miles of agricultural land is destroyed for suburbs, shopping centers and stripmines. Costlier fertilizers and deadlier pesticides are needed to pump more food from overworked dirt. Twentysix square miles of topsoil fly or float away daily. At the same time, America sells grains abroad, trying to feed nations which have preceded us toward agricultural ruin. More hunger is served by less land every day.
Good News
Relax, though, don't eat faster. We are not riding a spoon to the mouth of doom. You're doing your part to help the world by one or more of these changes: You're eating less meat, so that grains are fed to humans, and animals do not suffer. You're shopping for regional labels, rather than eating food hauled cross-country. You're growing some of your own food. You recycle kitchen scraps into your garden. you're buying bulk when you can, looking for food value rather than packaging. You ask your grocer to stock organic fruits and vegetables. You support small farms by spending at farmer's markets. You plant fruit trees rather than ornamentals. You control retail sales by joining or starting a buying club or coop. You're having a good time without wasting metals, plastic, oil, paper and electricity. You have one or fewer children, and adopt the rest. Cities and towns are starting to plant edible parks, to link building codes and development options to urban agriculture, to fund food preservation centers, turn clean sludge into fertilizer, establish land trusts and agricultural zones, and give tax breaks to greenhouses. Some states buy farming rights to agricultural land threatened with suburbanization. These and related can be done at the insistence of citizens. There are many organizations working to grow healthy food systems, providing money, information and encouragement for all who want to heal the earth. Even large factory farms are beginning to learn the benefits of non-toxic pest control, drip irrigation, green manure, mulching, intercropping, rotation and genetic diversity. The time is ripe.
Securing an American Future
Changes in food and fuel supply and distribution will bring changes in our personal lives, corporate goals and legal contracts. Some changes will be easy, others hard. All are opportunities for living better. Sooner, rather than later, developers will lose the right to destroy topsoil that could feed thousands of Americans for hundreds of years, merely to house suburbanites. But their skills will be needed to rebuild Ithaca toward balance with nature. These new laws, organizations and personal styles show understanding that, no matter how super our computers, we will never invent substitutes for food, water and air, that our nation will progress or erode with its soil, that ultimately the land is the law of the land.
The City Fruitful
. “You can count the number of seeds in an apple, but you can't count the number of apples in a seed." Fruits and nuts are better suited for urban agriculture than ground crops, because trees produce healthy fruits from contaminated soils. They bring toxins up the trunk but not into food. Moreover, tending trees is less laborious than raising vegetables. The next America will welcome orchards and gardens where cars now pass and park. Housing will consolidate to allow roofs and yards to bloom. At full flower, urban acres will be 50% edible (producing much of its own food), 20% habitable (with more people than today), 10% commercial (factories, markets, storage), 10% wild or unusable, 5% recreational (playing fields, playgrounds, amphitheaters), 5% mobile (trollies, bikepaths, pedways). This enormous change will be gradual and systematic, providing basic security and causing less disturbance than would trying to avoid change. Though food is assumed to grow outside cities, there are several reasons why food must be grown in cities and why, in fact, cities need to be rebuilt to make space for crops amid people. 1) SECURITY: Food does not grow on shelves or live in vending machines. It comes from distant soils, which are diminishing, and is owned by remote companies. We are more secure when we own and control food, in our neighborhoods. 2) ENERGY-EFFICIENCY: Oil and natural gas shortages will raise food prices, because agribusiness relies heavily on fossil fuels for planting, fertilizing, cultivating, harvest, processing, and distribution. 3) ENVIRONMENT: Air will become cleaner and fragrant, greenhouse gases will reduce, ground-level ozone will form less rapidly, stormwater will be absorbed, groundwater will be filtered, less packaging will be trashed. 4) SOCIAL: Neighborhood labor will generate more jobs and less crime, neighbors will know and trust one another, children will enjoy playgrounds and be connected to a safe and beautiful community. 5) PERSONAL: We’ll have greater mental and physical health, make new friends. To accommodate this transformation, several broad changes begin. • housing is rebuilt as ecolonies which consolidate residential space.