Articles Supporting Urban Farming to Reduce Global Warming

http://www.eatthesuburbs.org/2006/09/food-and-agriculture-essential-reading/

Some recent articles on urban and sustainable agriculture:

’The Oil We Eat’ Following the Food Chain back to Iraq

Richard Manning, Harper’s Magazine

The journalist’s rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.
first published January 31, 2003.
(A true classic article which might change the way you think about food.)

Eating Fossil Fuels

Dale Allen Pfeiffer, From The Wilderness Publications

As Peak Oil and its effects become a raging national controversy it’s time everyone reads the story that puts the most serious implications of Peak Oil and Gas into perspective. Your biggest problem is not that your SUV might go hungry, it’s that you and your children might go hungry.
first published October 2, 2003.

Peak Oil and Permaculture: David Holmgren on Energy Descent

Adam Fenderson, Global Public Media

David Holmgren, co-originator of the permaculture concept and author of Permaculture: Principals and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, speaks with Adam Fenderson from www.energybulletin.net about permaculture and its role in an energy constrained world.
first published June 6, 2004.

Don’t be Wasted on Grass! Lawns to Gardens!

Heather Coburn, excerpted from the forthcoming Food Not Lawns (Chelsea Green 2005).

French aristocrats popularized the idea of the green grassy lawn in the eighteenth century, when they planted the agricultural fields around their estates to grass, to send the message that they had more land than they needed and could therefore afford to waste some. Meanwhile, French peasants starved for lack of available ground, and the resulting frustration might have had something to do with the French Revolution in 1789.

Today, 58 million Americans spend approximately $30 billion every year to maintain over 23 million acres of lawn. That’s an average of over a third of an acre and $517 each. The same size plot of land could still have a small lawn for recreation, plus produce all of the vegetables needed to feed a family of six. The lawns in the United States consume around 270 billion gallons of water a week­enough to water 81 million acres of organic vegetables, all summer long.
(Cheers to Brad for sending us this one.)

Social Fertilizer: The big growth potential of urban agriculture

Amanda McCuaig, The Tyee

Community gardens are primarily hobbies here in Vancouver, but internationally they are known for their ability to feed entire cities.

Berkeley: Urban farmers produce nearly all their food with a sustainable garden in their backyard

John Fall, San Francisco Chronicle

An approximately 6,000-square-foot yard provides generous space for a bustling urban farm. From the street it is impossible to tell that the property holds everything from apple trees to tomato vines, rabbits to goats, and chickens to domesticated pigeons.
first published April 25, 2005.