Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Emerging interest in supporting an agrarian land ethic is embodied in
the slow food and eat-local movements that try to shorten the distance
between crop production and consumption. Yet energy efficiency in the
delivery of food to the table is not some radical new idea. Romans shipped
grain around the Mediterranean because the wind provided the energy
needed to transport food long distances. That’s why North Africa, Egypt,
and Syria fed Rome—it was too inefficient (and difficult) to drag western
European produce over the mountains into central Italy.
Similarly, as oil becomes more expensive it will make less sense to ship
food halfway around the world: the unglobalization of agriculture will
become increasingly attractive and cost effective. The average piece of
organic produce sold in American supermarkets travels some 1,500 miles
between where it is grown and where it is consumed. Over the long run,
when we consider the effect on the soil and on a post-oil world, markets
for food may work better (although not necessarily more cheaply) if they
are smaller and less integrated into a global economy, with local markets
selling local food. As it becomes increasingly expensive to get food produced
elsewhere to the people, it will become increasingly attractive to take
food production to the people—into the cities.
Despite its seemingly contradictory name, urban agriculture is not an
oxymoron. Throughout much of preindustrial history city wastes were primarily
organic and were returned to urban and quasi-urban farms to enrich
the soil. In the mid-nineteenth century, one sixth of Paris was used to
produce more than enough salad greens, fruits, and vegetables to meet the
city’s demand—fertilized by the million tons of horse manure produced by
the city’s transportation system. More productive than modern industrial
farms, the labor-intensive system became so well known that intensive
compost-based horticulture is still called French gardening.
Urban farming has been growing rapidly—worldwide more than 800
million people are engaged in urban agriculture to some degree. The
World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization encourage
urban farming in efforts to feed the urban poor in developing countries.
But urban farming is not restricted to developing countries; by the late
1990s one out of ten families in some U.S. cities were engaged in urban
agriculture, as were two-thirds of Moscow’s families. Urban farms not only
deliver fresh produce to urban consumers the same day it is harvested, with
lower transportation costs and the use of far less water and fertilizer, they
can absorb a significant amount of solid and liquid waste, reducing urban
waste disposal problems and costs. Eventually it may well be worth recon-
life span of civilizations 243