Daydreaming Again

In my mind there is a city. The density is about 15,000 families per square mile (That's about 3 million people for a city the square mileage of Manhattan Island, so dense, but not too dense), living in mid-rises and row houses.

When I was young, there was a community garden for every mile of land (meaning there still had to be a lot of food trucked in), but as I've gotten older--and technology has gotten cooler--that's now a 40-story vertical farm, employing a tenth of the people living in the one-mile "food circle" and providing no fewer than 1000 different crops. The growing highrise is adjacent to a processing facility that turns the farm's peanuts into peanut butter and its chilies into hot sauce. Employees of the vertical farm get paid and also get a free share of the crops.

There's still a park for every mile, too, in place of my original community garden plots, because people need to sit on the grass and that grass cools down the city wonderfully.

The population is diverse and well-integrated, without sacrificing the feeling of cultural community that, say, an Irish girl might want to have with other Irish people who live nearby and understand the necessity of having a butcher around who knows how to make a proper black pudding.

And you can have that black pudding, if you want. Outside of town, there's a ring of farms that are designed to raise cattle and sheep and chickens in such a way that their waste can be turned into biofuel (haven't ever figured out how to harness the methane in their wind, but it may come to me). They are pastured, of course, and the pastures are covered in local grasses, organically grown.

Back in the city, commercial and residential areas are mixed, so that there don't need to be any "big box" stores that take an hour to drive to, because you can find pretty much everything you need within a couple of miles' walk of your home: groceries, a shoemaker, a yarn boutique, a hair salon, an electronics store--all the important things. Industry nestles up against home where possible--polluting smokestacks are replaced with carbon filter caps and green energy buildings.

People know each other and the schools are safe and thorough in their educating and the kids come home to family members or neighbors who make sure they get a good afternoon snack, a bit of exercise, and a quiet place to do their homework. There are enough baseball, football, and soccer fields, along with hockey rinks, swimming pools, and basketball courts, to make sure there's something for almost everyone.

Every building has solar PV built right in, so there's no need for more than a couple of wind farms on the outskirts of town to supplement the grid and provide the power for battery-operated car docking stations. When there's no wind and little sun, car owners can make a little money dumping energy back into the grid.

For people who want to grow their own food, or just don't want to pay for the produce at the store on the ground floor of the vertical farm, there are garden plots on all the building roofs, making sure that people have a contact to nature and a cooler roof in summer and less run off all year long. Kids learn how the food chain works by growing things, picking them when they are ripe, and going downstairs to the apartment to cook them minutes later.

People have also rediscovered the use of water cisterns, which adorn all the buildings, providing as much of the water for each building as the climate will allow. There's central plumbing and water reclamation facilities and fresh tap water--don't worry. Nobody has to live on only what the rain provides, but at least the cisterns take a little bit of the burden off the water grid.

People don't worry so much about paper or plastic. Because it's never more than a few blocks to the local grocer (who is also the local farmer), people are content to bring their baskets--just like those quaint ones we all see in the "rural middle ages" movies.

Except that these baskets are filled with not just the foods that could be grown outside in the agricultural zone, but foods that are grown in the vertical farms. In the northern midwest, people can get melons and berries until November and again in April because the vertical farm acts like a season extender. It's all about resources, of course, so the place doesn't keep the temperatures tropical year-round. The heat and lighting are dictated by the region, to an extent, but the seasons of bounty are a little longer, produce from warmer climes can be grown during the warmer months, and the cold season still provides enough to live on.

This kind of city has always been a dream of mine--a place where people can get everything they need without going too far and wasting too much. And you want to know the funny thing? This isn't a new idea, or one that is unattainable.

The Amish do it--sure, they have more contact and trade with the "English" world now, but they still pretty much get what they need right near home. There are communities in many parts of the world that don't bother with the rest of us too terribly often. They do just fine.

The big problem is that most of us no longer know what "getting what we need" means. I'll admit it: getting what I need sometimes means buying the latest scifi film. It sometimes means Starbucks or a 3 Musketeers bar or that ever-needed lemon. I'm not shy about the fact that I like having things!

But maybe we should rethink how we get those things. Al Gore proposed a plan last year to replace US energy generation as we know it with 100% carbon-free sources in the next ten years. (Wow--and he thought running for president was hard!)

It's a fantastic idea that most of the establishment immediately marked as fundamentally unattainable. Let's stop and think a minute, though. What would his daydream world look like?

People who have spent their lives working in the steel, automobile, and coal industries have been losing their jobs by the thousands. In Al Gore's daydream, they'd be put back to work--first retrofitting the plants where they used to work and then building concentrating mirrors for solar arrays, or electric cars, or windmills. People could be put to work designing and building the new electrical infrastructure we need to make sure that the wind in Iowa can help power the buildings of Philly.

People who bought those new electric cars would be faced with expensive personal conveyances that could, in part, pay for themselves in a very real way. One of the problems we have to deal with while growing a new energy economy is the fact that, really, our batteries kind of suck. Once the sun goes down and the wind stops howling, we need to store that energy. By plugging in your electric car and charging it up, you'd be providing that battery. So why could we not, say, have all those garages in all those highrises in all those big cities install smart meters--meters that allow electricity to go both ways. During the day, the car could be charged by the grid. At night, if the car owner so desired, the battery in that car could help to light the highrise and lighten the driver's electricity bill.

(This is a particularly attractive choice for families like mine, who rarely use their car. In this future, our car could hold down the parking spot and the utility bill!)

His world would no doubt rethink agriculture as we know it. Less thinking about immediate yield and more about sustainable futures. It would have sustainably harvested forests. He probably even dreams of carbon-neutral air travel--though personally, I think we need to rethink the need for "live and in person" speaking engagements and make it fashionable to "satellite in" via audio-visual uplink.

The point here is, there are millions of us who have dreams about these things. And yes, I'm unlikely to ever be able to make my dream a full reality. But I can join the local garden club that plants and tends the greenery in those little havens of oxygen called city parks. I can plant some herbs in my kitchen (if I can find a way to keep the cat from eating them) and reduce at least some of my food miles. I can write my local electric company (again) and complain (again) about the fact that they (still) don't offer green energy (even though there are some hydroelectric and wind power plants in the midwest).

So dream, but work, too. Sure, there are the standard "use CFLs, plant a tree, turn off the TV, ride a bike" things that all of us know we should be doing, but what other things can you come up with that you yourself can do to make at least a little bit of your dream come true?

Think about it and get back to me, okay?

________

Want to find people living the dream? Global Ecovillage Network is just that--a network of ecovillages around the globe. Kinda cool.

A Change of Perspective

It's got to be the cold, wintry weather around here making me yearn for growing season. Or maybe it's the fact that I'm actually doing okay with the spending situation just now so I'm less obsessed, but I'm much more focused on agriculture than financial responsibility at the moment.

I have made it a habit lately to look around the internet for non-US-related news. I admit that I am a pretty typical American (read: ethnocentric--specifically Amero-centric), but I'm trying to break myself of that because I think that part of the global problem these days is that we're all out for ourselves and aren't really paying attention to the other guy. Sure, we all get a little teary when we see those Sarah McLachlan commercials for the ASPCA, but how many of us actually donate?

Anyway, in my perusals of international news sites, I've been focusing on agriculture the past few days. Earlier this week, the UN held a Meeting on Food Security. While I applaud the idea of a globally donated fund to help the hungriest and neediest, I still am concerned that A) there is too much talk and not enough action in big UN-driven things like this, and B) there is too much emphasis on fertilizers and "modern" technology like GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

I don't know that I'm against the concept of GMOs per se--I mean, the idea is basically cross-breeding of plants on a grander scale. It's just that we're taking the tradition idea of grafting the grape vine that has the sweetest fruit onto the grape vine with the heartiest, most fungus-resistant stalks and turning it into the "21st century technology" idea of splicing a bacteria into a grape vine instead. It's... a little scary, given that we're not sure what effect those grape vines are going to have once they enter the wider world and possibly change the ecosystems around them.

There are other ways to increase crop yield and prevent devastation from pests and infections. Ze de Antonio is a farmer in Brazil who grows more than 25 crops on his 2 acres of land. The diversity of the plantings creates a local ecology which lessens the likelihood that an opportunistic parasite or infection vector could blow out a whole crop. It also builds balance and water-retention in the ground, making the soil itself more fertile.

Note that Diaconia, the NGO that taught de Antonio what he needed to know to thrive in his semi-arid home, spent only about $3000-4000 over eight years on his training. Universities now use him and others like him to train the next generation of farmers. It's not necessarily more expensive to learn to farm as he does. In fact, when you factor in just exactly how much fertilizers and "high-yield seed" cost, it might just be cheaper.

And it can be done community by community. The Mudgee Microscope Club in Australia is a group of farmers who are trying to see whether their attempts to farm sustainably are having any good effects on the soil around them. The fact that they get together as a local group, studying their own soil, makes a kind of sense that globally-donated emergency food funds--necessary though they may be--just don't.

I don't think we can change the face of agriculture completely with small-scale changes. There is no way to feed the projected 9 billion people who will inhabit this earth come 2050 by setting up small farms like Ze de Antonio's. Subsistence farming is farming to provide for you and yours and not much else. By definition, the only way that would work is if every single family in the world had 2 acres of arable land and actually spent their time growing on it.

I do think, however, that there are answers beyond the unsustainable monocultures and pesticide/fertilizer dependence of industrial agriculture. There have to be, because monoculture ensures that if a pest infests a field, there's a very real possibility that acre after acre could be wiped out for a season, leading to more hunger, not less. Monoculture farming and especially fertilizers and pesticides also deplete the soil of balance and nutrients, ensuring that each year's crops are a little weaker, a little less abundant.

Polyculture farms are the way to feed us all, I think. Yes, I still think we need vertical farming and an overall decrease in the use of raw materials for low-return foodstuffs (like fast food, for instance, which uses more resources for less nutritional result), but it seems to me that if we could make it affordable and attractive for farmers to grow ten different crops instead of one, we might be on to something.

Maybe instead of continuing to make it attractive to farm acres and acres of corn through subsidies for ethanol and corn syrup production, we should think about subsidizing the cost of a rotating farm. Not because the lobbies in Washington will get anything out of it, but because a farmer could rotate eleven different fields with ten different crops (leaving a different field fallow every year to renew) and rehabilitate his land while increasing both his yield and his ability to market himself--ten crops from one farmer!

Now, I know I said this whole blog thing was going to be mostly about what we can do ourselves to change the world, but this? It's something we need to think about. Because if we as a society, as individual people working together, start looking at the world differently, it all changes. Subtly, maybe. Slowly at first. But it changes.

After all, we started thinking "hey, why isn't there a car that could have a battery that would be charged by occasional use of the gasoline-powered motor, so that we could use less gas but still go as far as we wanted to go?" The hybrid cars of today may not be the electric cars of the future (or the past, but I won't rant about who killed the electric car right now), but they're better than the cars that get 20 miles to the gallon.

So what if we all started thinking "hey, maybe we should try some gasoline and oil replacement other than corn ethanol. That way we could maybe use the land for growing food instead of fuel. And what if we ate a little less processed food? That way, again, more of the land could go to growing actual foodstuffs instead of growing stuff that's turned into corn syrup and adds to our obesity problem."

It's a mindset change. It's a way to get us all to notice the world around us and see what we can think of that could make it all work a little better.

And I'm telling you, the first vertical farm that gets built in my area? I'm totally quitting my job and working there full time!