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."

Comments

More study is needed

[fatcat1111]

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."

Re:To quote Sam Kinison...

[DamnRogue]

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.

Duh, yourself

[fm6]

I don't know whether to say "Kneejerk response" or "RTFA."

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.

Re:Smarter Urban-Growth?

[Spamalamadingdong]

Los Angeles can't get enough drinking water; they're draining the Colorado River dry before it reaches the sea

Not that it's particularly good drinking water. The amount of salt in it makes it inadvisable for some people (e.g. hypertensives) to drink, and this same salt requires measures to defend against salination when used for irrigation.

and still they can't get enough water.

Never mind that the sunlight falling on Los Angeles would probably be sufficient to desalinate all the fresh water they'd really need. 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?

Yet they grow rice in the desert!

All paid for by Federal irrigation projects, meaning taxpayers nationwide.

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.

And we wonder why the rest of the world thinks we're idiots.

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.