Postapocalyptic Gardens

Growing your own food might be fun, but it’s not the best survival strategy.

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Complete entry

Posted by Patrick Anderson  on  07/17  at  09:18 AM

Marcelo,

I've been wishing the city I live in would choose nut trees, fruit
trees, berry bushes, grape vines for the otherwise ornamental plants
they install. We (the people of that city) could also choose spices
and herbs for the smaller ornamentals; and many other plants such as
squash, peppers, even tomato and potato look as pretty as many of the
barren greenery we suicidally choose instead.

By doing so, as oil increases in price, and as unemployment increases
in severity, and as the Federal Reserve Note continues to lose value,
we will then have plenty of work to do with enormous direct reward.

But this is all assuming we would be growing for our *own* consumption
instead of attempting to sell any of the product.

Since we don't have any real control at the city level I wonder if you
see a neighborhood/community doing this - moving toward permaculture -
do you see that as a negative thing?

Must we continue to water and work on plants that have no value
whatsoever while hoping we can afford to purchase Pine Nuts from
China? Wouldn't you rather know what was sprayed on them and wouldn't
you rather have the security that those trees will produce each year,
dropping the food nearly at our doorstep without the need for
petroleum or the increasing political difficulty of crossing borders?

Do we really want to be in the stranglehold of another nation?

And even if the food is produced in the country you live in, if it is
owned by a for-profit corporation, then they will make it too
expensive to even consider.

We could have hundreds of tons of nearly free food and the raw
materials for medicines, soaps, clothes and building materials if we
would get-over our myopic mindset that governments should never be
productive.

Local production is difficult for single individual, but is a powerful
solution when we can "get together" to share the complexity.

We (the people) should be owning sawmills, plastic-recycling
equipment, repair shops, restaurants (yes, restaurants), storage
facilities, agriculture equipment and factories of all sorts.

But we are too scared or too stupid ... but another problem that leads
to such pitifully weak cities is the way property taxes punish
improvements while allowing land-hoarders to withhold as much as they
want - leading to sprawl and destitution.

There is more to this, but I must "go to work" to pay a mortgage
(literally "death grip") to bankers that never did any work in their
lives and yet steal almost all of our value because we fail to
organize locally for our good. We, the potential consumers, must
organize for product instead of profit.

Posted by Marcelo  on  07/17  at  09:54 PM

Patrick,

I appreciate the advantages of local food production, but I don't think it scales very well. Small-scale agriculture is very expensive in terms of work and land per calorie. It's true that if you have an otherwise unused park and free available time (e.g., due to a recession), then it makes sense to do grow food using that land and that work. But is working the land truly the most productive ---let's forget profitability and talk about personal or social utility, if you'd like me to--- most people can be? There's a reason why historically cities have been more dynamic culturally and technologically: specializing the production of food gives non-farmers the time to pursue other fields. You cannot have a doctor-farmer, or an engineer-farmer, as all of those activities are full time (when you take into account the secondary activities of farming like equipment maintenance, etc).

A similar argument makes me wary of widely distributed machining equipment (I mean, as a long-term survival or economic strategy, not as a right, hobby, passion, or whatever; I'll be the last person to begrudge anyone the awesome that must be to have your own production equipment on your yard).

Take a modern saw. It's a very useful tool to build things, but what if you have to replace the blade? An equivalent blade is nigh-impossible to build in a distributed small-scale economy: just the high-quality steel or carbide practically demand a full industrial infrastructure. 20th century electronics. Any sort of drugs; what happens with diabetics without a full network of laboratories, and the industries necessary to make the laboratories run? And so on and so forth. I believe it's possible to "cut out" a bunch of contemporary economy resources and build with that a more self-sufficient local economy, but it won't be technologically self-sufficient, and as the equipment breaks, the choices will be to reconnect with the larger economy ---hoping that it's still there---, keep giving up technology until you reach a self-sustainable technological level, or rebuild the large, complex economy just left behind.

A remark on choice 2: While a part of the quality of life differential with, say, the 16th century comes from knowing more than them in certain useful areas, a lot of it comes from all the industrial machinery, factories, roads, know how, colleges, and trillions of dollars of other things that have been built over the centuries. The copper mines in Chile (and the transportation and commercial network between you and them) are part of why you have cheap wires to install a solar panel on your roof. Without the copper mines and the ships to bring the copper and the energy sources for the ships, etc, the supply of copper wires becomes fixed (which means slowly diminishing). So you can't put up another roof with solar panels, and neither can your neighbors. Awkward (I'm being a bit short here; I know you can store as much wire as you are likely to need during your lifetime; but what about future generations?).

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