Slashdot Mirror
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/
Furthermore, the world as a whole alrady produces more than enough food for everyone to eat well. The real issue is food transportation and storage. It doesn't matter if you can grow billions upon billion tons of wheat in the Ukraine if you can't get it to the hungry people in Africa. There are a whole host of blockages in the way: physical difficulties of getting perishable goods to remote locations, the inability of people in said locations to pay market price, political trade limitations, regional warlords, etc, etc.
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
One always needs a study to prove the "obvious." To a lot people, it's obvious that violent movies and videogames induce violent behavior in children, or that seeing an exposed breast on television is traumatic.
"Common sense" is the name we give to our personal prejudices.
"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.
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!