cheap mens jeans pedestrian and bike friendly, compact communities with mixed use developments, higher density and public transit, everything the Republican party and Agenda21ers are against.
That is the problem with the concept of Resilience; Some, like Cameron Tonkinwise of The New School, call it “militarized conservativeness, the worst of libertarianism in contexts of calamity.” Unlike Cameron and Alex Steffen, who prefers “ruggedization”, I think resilience can be positive and aspirational, and does not necessarily involve guns and ammo.
Our current food system delivers vast quantities of food at what are really unbelievably cheap prices; until very recently, food expenditures as a proportion of income had never been lower. But that has been changing recently as food costs have been increasing, and incomes have stagnated or gone backwards. That is only going to get worse, as we feed more corn to cars than we do to animals and people. The system already operates on a knife-edge; thousands can be poisoned when e-coli gets into spinach because it is all bagged and shipped from the factory farms in California. There is no diversity of sourcing; In Canada two years ago, dozens died from listeria poisoning from one dirty machine in Toronto.
If some sort of crisis causes a shortage of diesel fuel, grocery shelves will be depleted in a matter of days. And if severe, extended drought occurs in the West combined with a lack of winter snowpack in the Rockies, the Colorado River–upon which much of California’s most productive farmland is dependent–might not deliver enough water, causing food shortages and skyrocketing prices.
A local food system is much more resilient and flexible, and good for the local economy. Alex also notes that people can also be part of the system by growing their own:
Food production can be even more local than nearby farms. We learned during World War II that Americans have the capacity to grow a significant fraction of their vegetables at home. As much as 40% of fresh produce consumed by Americans during the War was produced in homeowners’ victory gardens, allowing more of the nation’s farm output to be sent overseas to soldiers. While we have more than twice the population today, and thus less land per person, there is still significant potential for home gardens.
There is another thing that people used to do a lot of, that like farming and local food, is coming back with a vengeance, and that’s canning. My wife writes about cooking local food for TreeHugger and Planet Green, and we eat pretty much a 19th century Ontario diet, no doubt similar to what they ate in Alex’s Vermont. She shops at the farmers market when things are in season and local stuff is cheap, and spends much of August and September canning it. There are 800 jars of food in our basement; we eat it all winter in lieu of imported vegetables and fruits.
It demonstrates that resilience is more than a hunker in the bunker, it is about a lifestyle that is healthy and independent but interconnected with community. It is a lifestyle that has been promoted since Aesop’s Ant and the Grasshopper and the Three Little Pigs: be prepared and build tough.Fake rolex watches
Feb
16
Resilient Design: Water in a Drought-Prone Era
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