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Cities Built on Fertile Lands Affect Climate
Devar writes "While cities provide vital habitat for human beings to thrive, it appears U.S. cities have been built on the most fertile soils, lessening contributions of these lands to Earth's food web and human agriculture, according to a study by NASA researchers and others. Though cities account for just 3 percent of continental U.S. land area, the food and fiber that could be grown there rivals current production on all U.S. agricultural lands, which cover 29 percent of the country. Studies like this one may lead to smarter urban-growth strategies in the future."
Cities grow up where people first settle, and people first settle where the land is fertile.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Of course, this research is of no consequence. Governments are not going to moderate their behavior in response to this knowledge when it's much easier to maintain the status quo and drag out that old line, "More study is needed."
How Politicians Lie: http://www.factcheck.org/
One would think that this would be something that it doesn't really necessitate a study to prove. Obviously cities are going to be built on fertile ground because in order for a city to grow, it must have food. It hasn't really been until this century until people could move places where there was no abundant source of food, or especially water.
Also, no one really ever sets out to build a big city, they just grown from smaller cities that grew from smaller settlements.
"We have deserts, we just don't live there. You wanna eat? MOVE TO WHERE THE FOOD IS!"
So, in light of this study, what should we do? Tear down existing cities and rebuild them where things don't grow? What about that minor issue of water supply?
Never mind that every year, we manage to increase our crop yeilds on the same amount of land because of superior agricultural technology and methods.
Sorry, but I see another scaremongering study to push one interest groups agenda here. Anti-growth, more than likely. And the notion that because our cities sit on fertile land we're contributing to world hunger when we outproduce just about everybody, well, that's just horseshit. We export quite a bid of food already. So what, are we still not doing our part? That's the tone I get from the article.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
By the way, this place where I live is called "poison water" -- yeah, that's it, "poison water."
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Let's do the second thing first. The point of the article is not that people build on fertile land. The point is that in doing so, they affect the environment and the food supply.
Second, it's not as simple as saying, "that's where people want to live, too bad." Silicon Valley is built on the best farmland in California, possibly in North America. The early electronic factories didn't come here for easy access to food -- they came here to be near Stanford and the Moffett Naval Air Station. Later high-tech companies came here to be near existing high-tech companies, and to tap the labor pool. There were urban centers they could have built in, but farmland was cheaper.
The huge growth that followed was inevitable, and even desireable. But it could have been a lot better managed. Swathes of orchards could have been set aside, which would have made the Valley a nicer place to live, helped recharge the water table (lots of droughts here) and fought smog (trees suck up a lot of air polution). Instead of building willy-nilly, housing could have been concentrated in logical locations connected by heavy-duty transit corridors, including mass transit (the traffic jams are horrendous, and even if there were money for more freeways, there's no place to put them).
Back in the 60s and 70s, when things started to ramp up, the County government tried to do something like the above. But county-wide planning would have eliminated the huge profits of real-estate developers. So they persuaded various little towns, some of them little more than railroad stops, to annex huge patches of land, exempting them from county planning.
There's a street that runs on a rise at the side end of the valley, called Blossom Hill Road. The name comes from the fact that driving their in the spring brought you face to face with a shocking amount of floral color. Now all you see is urban sprawl. I never go there.
If California had to pay for all of this itself, much of the state would dry up and blow away overnight. And it ought to.
Including this native-born American. It is just one more example of how subsidies create destructive incentives.FWIW, I think the ~$2/gallon subsidy we give oil via our defense spending is just as insane; if we charged the cost of defending ourselves and the Middle East against oil-financed extremism via fuel taxes, we would not have had an SUV craze. At $3.50 or more per gallon, there would not be enough of a market for Escalades, Hummers, Excursions and monster pickups to create the variety of models which lures people to use them as image statements (other than "I have more money than sense"), and we would be safer and richer (with a much healthier balance of payments) than we are with our hidden oil subsidies.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
The essential problem on Long Island is that farmers cant afford to grow there, or the incentives for them to sell their farms is just too great. Say you have a 20-30 acre farm in the middle of LI. Your taxes are going to be extremely high, and you are growing potatoes or corn or whatever on it, most likely just eeking out a living. Bob the builder comes along and says he will give you $100,000/acre for your farm. Are YOU going to say no? 2 mil at 5% interest still nets you 100k/ year.
Urban planning policies in this instance would have to give the farmer pretty hefty incentives to stay a farmer. My area (36 miles from NYC near the nassau/suffolk border) had a few farms around it and a bit of undeveloped land when we moved here about 8 years ago. Now there are houses everywhere, with one farm left standing. The change is remarkable. Property values have skyrocketed, but the cozy charm the area once had is quickly diminishing, and traffic has increased noticeably. In 20-30 years im fairly certain that you wont be able to live w/in commuting distance of manhattan for less than a million dollars.
"Urbanization follows agriculture -- it's a natural and important human process," said Imhoff.Throughout history, highly productive agricultural land brought food, wealth and trade to an area, all of which fostered settlements.
This has little to do with Silicon Valley. In fact, the entire concept is a no-brainer to any civilization that ever settled anywhere on the planet.
In fact, I wonder why NASA wasted money on this study in the first place.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Actually, counterintuitively, some people are hungry because the US produces _too much_ food, at too low a price. Thereby outcompeting farmers in developing nations, thereby driving them out of business.
t er ian_apr_15_hunger_report.htmlu lation.com/articles/2001/000049 .html
Oh - and in the process of heavily subsidizing agriculture, we effectively make fertile land worth less, which means it is easier for other activities to outcompete farming for the land. This is true both in the US and in developing countries.
(btw, I don't disagree with the statement that the spread of freedom and capitalism are also likely to help reduce hunger, as long as they are implemented along with the appropriate governmental/societal institutions. Read Globalization and Its Discontents to see how not to spread capitalism...)
http://www.bread.org/media/articles/2003/presby
http://www.overpop
The US government's agricultural subsidies actually significantly distort the entire market. If we got rid of them, we might actually see fertile land become more valuable. We don't let other countries dump steel on us, why should we dump agricultural goods on them? Of course, I would also argue that this problem is actually much more severe in other countries. To use anecdotal evidence, Egypt has a very narrow fertile corridor (called the land next to the Nile). But it is busy building on all of its arable lands because people want to live next to where everyone else lives. If they had just a little bit of urban planning, they could shift new settlements out a couple miles into the desert (same climate, almost same location, but very different soil, and you have to pipe some water a little further), and thereby save their domestic agriculture market. But as long as the US dumps food on them, they have little incentive to have domestic farms.
I can't think of any reason why toilets can't be flushed with saltwater and lawns and plants watered with reclaimed graywater, can you?
Perhaps because a parallel plumbing and reclamation system would be necessary to keep the saltwater and freshwater separate? Is that really contributing a net gain or just shifting the damage? Another possible reason is that most fresh water is consumed in agriculture, not toilets, by a margin of about 15 to 1.
And we wonder why the rest of the world thinks we're idiots.
No, we don't, because we're increasingly immune to BAF bullshit and discount it automatically. The rest of the world is doing it's level best to emulate us in every conceivable manner and has been for the past century, regardless of what the worlds activists happen to be saying. Why are they flattering idiots?
Including this native-born American. It is just one more example of how subsidies create destructive incentives.
Would that include subsidies to car manufacturers to develop and market low-emission vehicles and power trains that run on renewables? It could be you're thinking of grant funded research that produces results similar as those we see here. Perhaps you are referring to subsidizing alternative energy sources for electricity, including offsetting operating costs. Or maybe you mean ITER or NIF... Is it really subsidies in general or just the subsidies you, in all your righteous genius, don't happen to think are proper, as you sit there well-fed in your heated dwelling writing messages in your spare time for distribution on a network initially developed using federal defense subsidies?
if we charged the cost of defending ourselves and the Middle East against oil-financed extremism via fuel taxes, we would not have had an SUV craze. At $3.50 or more per gallon...
You want to pay for defending ourselves against oil financed extremism by charging ~$2 a gallon more in taxes to end the SUV craze. I have a better idea; let's stop causing the market to buy vehicles based on truck chassis by allowing manufactures to build sufficiently sized vehicles based on passenger car chassis. I believe a small relaxation of CAFE and EPA standards on passenger cars would allow vehicle fleets to meet the expectations of the American market, but that the fleet average regulations prevent building appealing cars. Split the difference between 27.5mpg (cars) and 20.5mpg ("light" trucks) and we can start making cars again. The entire SUV episode the fault of these regulations because the market has been forced to choose between a car that's a couple hundred pounds too small/light (say, the difference between 3.4k and 4k lbs) and a truck that's a couple thousand pounds too heavy.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
While we can always hope for smarter urban growth strategies, their widespread adoption isn't likely, at least not in the near term.
Every year, all throughout the Southeastern United States, there are people who live in a town built on the Mississippi River flood plain who, when the river floods (as it does every year), instead of moving to a better place, decide to try to control the river's flooding by building levies. The levies, of course, are preventing the Mississippi from carrying as much silt as it used to, which is causing erosion. Never mind that the land is more useful for irrigation farming.
There are people in the midwest who, despite living on land so unbelievably flat that you can't see a single hill or Mountain, and despite the area being known as "Tornado Alley", act surprised and heartbroken when their towns are ripped apart by tornadoes year after year.
All throughout American history, people just built their towns on the first, most immediately convenient place they came across, with little or no regard as to whether or not it was actually a good place for a town. A great many years later, despite the technology for advanced climatological and ecological studies being available (that would tell these cities' current inhabitants that their town is situated in the worst possible place), people continue to live in these places. After each disaster, people keep coming back.
Idiots.
But one of the reasons why city land is so fertile is that it has been a city for so long. If we used moved and used the old city as farm land for 10 years, it would suddenly stop being the most fertile land and the new city we built would become the most fertile land.
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