JD is correct on many points. This is obvious stuff to thinking people. Not news. Any idiot not inhaling diesel exhaust and purple slurpees can see that most 'country living' today is a bad Disneyesque joke.

But I will not give him a pass. He changed his web site to coverup his complicity in denying peak oil, debunking good-faith efforts at modeling it and making appropriate predictions, and he still to this day aggressively dismisses and denigrates efforts at change and self-preservation. Screw JD

Your point that commutes are shorter to suburban ring business is correct. However they are by car. Those older commutes into the center city were by bus and train--more energy efficient, more sociable. (My dad smoked, drank, and played cards on the way home from work.).

Asphalt covers up dirt. The soil was removed (bad for road beds) and went away. Poof. It will not be farmed again.

There was never any doubt that small scale production is less energy efficient. But I am not growing my own fruit to compete with Walmart, I am growing my own fruit because I do not think that Walmart will be supported by a population that is not employed.

Yup!

That flowing into the city has two sources. Population excess and economic opportunities. That is not an issue here in the US. And peasants are not how I would describe the vast majority of agricultural workers in developing countries. They are farmers, land owners, usual with very small acreage farms compared to the US and still living in extended families in tight knit communities.

There is nothing stopping rural US from falling back to this basic structure. There is still a high quality of life possible. It only requires a re socialization. It will take a generation augmented by the catalysts of necessity.

This will all happen so much more easily than most people imagine. Necessity can knock you off your high horse of self entitlement within a couple of years. Rural folks are more resilient and already adapted to external forces beyond their control that they submit to........like the weather for example.

No problem here really

You left out probably the biggest one. Multinational agriculture corps buying up the farm land.

I do not agree. That only 2% of US population earns a living in agriculture suggests that the vast majority of Americans are no longer on or near the land.

Do you really believe the landed six-million will welcome 294 million visitors when they no longer have employment in the global/retail economy?

City? suburban?, who the fark knows. I know that once IT happens, everyone will say the answer was obvious all along.

WOW! I've just spent an hour and a half on PO.com. Just like the old days. Are we becoming interesting again?

Both your point and Pstarr's are valid and related. Industrial agriculture reduced the number of farmers. I really temporarily forgot how very few farmers there really are anymore in the US. I spend most of my time away in developing countries these days.

So who is going to fill this void I guess is the question. We will have vast vast areas of sparsely populated agricultural lands and all these displaced and increasingly unemployed people in suburbia and in urban areas.

Is there an economic model that will repopulate these rural areas?

I did mention previously that I notice more and more first generation immigrants selling fruits and vegetables in farmers markets in the US. Vietnamese, mexicans, filipinos.....they are increasingly buying farm land.

Few will want to willingly go back to rural farming but at what point does the clusterfuck of unemployed in urban and suburban areas get so bad that we do see migration back into rural America?

There is an irony here. Overshoot due to overpopulation resulting in the paradox that our rural lands have become depopulated. This is really due to industrial agriculture and it is alarming since this weakens the resiliency of our system. We do not have the vast diversity of small farms growing many varieties of fruits and vegetables and grains.

This is not nearly so extreme in developing countries where you can see each small land holding with chickens, pigs, fruit trees etc. They may be planting hybrid varieties of rice developed by the industrial agricultural companies but in countries like the Philippines, Thailand etc.that I am familiar with these are still being farmed in small farms.

Actually that is the whole point, it wasn't JDs point but mine.

The main benefit of local food, farmers markets, CSAs, direct sales, farm tours/ag tourism, organic everything, cage free birds, grass fed beef and on and on is to train the consumer to buy local and give the new small farmer a chance.

This is true. I am realistically trying to envision the transition of these activities into sustainable businesses on a vast scale. I think one thing to consider is that industrial agriculture will adapt. Take the philippines for example. I was on a bus a few months ago in rural Mindoro and seeing all these rice fields, small 20-50 acre parcels separately owned. There were advertisements, small little billboards (about the size of for sale signs you see real estate agents use when selling homes in America) and these signs were from the agro chemical industry that was promoting everything from seed varieties, to pesticides and fertilizers.

We tend to think of industrial agriculture in the states as geared toward these vast mega farms because that is what happened here. But in developing countries the economics have been different and farms have stayed small at the same time that they have incorporated many of the products of industrial agriculture.

This example might be instructive as to what may happen in the states. We will see these cottage industries you mentioned above but we will not see industrial agriculture turn over and die and everything go organic.

The driving force will be economic. When organic costs less it will dominate. If industrial agriculture on a small scale is more cost effective we may see it adapting as it has in developing countries. This may have drifted somewhat off topic.

I suppose we will be forced to a point where large scale ag uses more and more "organic" methods to raise cereal crops on land best suited to them, raise animals on grass in areas best suited etc. It will be a long time I think till there will be no transport, just less.

Here is a guy I really like, http://web.missouri.edu/~ikerdj/papers/

It's already happening around here. We have a farmer's market with at least 16 farmers who are now selling their produce locally instead of to a distant market. Land that has been barely used for years is coming back, and most importantly the community is re-organizing under the farmer's market and downtown revitalization groups. Organizations like the Grange need to change and embrace this new movement. It's happening anyway.

http://www.skowheganfarmersmarket.com/

You're doing just what you said we're not supposed to do with peakers, i.e. blaming the messenger. I don't like JD's overarching goals, but I'm willing to read his arguments if any of them make any sense whatsoever. Unfortunately, they do. Making that concession is not a blanket endorsement of JD. But I don't think it's smart to have a see-no-evil attitude about peak oil critics.

I have my own personal reasons for not liking reurbanization, even if it is effective from a thermodynamic perspective. For one thing, I don't like cramped metropolis style living. I think it is highly unlikely that a reurbanized city would be a Kunstler paradise. More than likely, post-peak, a reurbanized city would be like Calcutta.

It also involves continued faith in macro-level systems. Monsanto, Roundup, etc... When you cramp yourself into some sort of Blade Runner living situation, you have no self sufficiency whatsoever. You are a machine in the economy that must exchange your labor for your sustenance. Maybe one tomato plant in your balcony window is about all you can arrange. So everybody is locked into sinking or swimming based on the fate of the house of cards.

I believe that a lot of today's Alex Jones paranoia springs from this sense of hopeless dependence on a vast complicated system for life support. If for any reason some malicious force decided to deliberately pull the plug here and there, then we'd see massive die-offs result. So whether such plans exist or not, people have a growing sense of vulnerability to forces well beyond their control.

Lastly, reurbanization is not a long-term solution to our environmental/carrying-capacity problems. I don't see how megafarms can clean up their act and no longer cause soil erosion, nitrogen algae blooms, aquifer depletion, etc... So it seems to me as nothing more than an effective stalling maneuver.

But perhaps that's the way we'll have to go, to adapt in different ways as the situation on the ground evolves. What is most effective at the earlier stages of post-peak is probably different from what is most effective when we're on our last legs.

But if Kunstler says that the suburbs were the biggest waste of resources in history, I can only imagine how the world will judge massive urbanization if, at some more future point, the house of cards still collapses, resulting in a boomerang effect of back to the landers. I would prefer that we not keep frantically moving from tactic to tactic, but to stick to one path.



That's funny. I'm "farming" in raised beds on top of concrete. Seems to be okay even for nantes half-length carrots. Now of course I had to buy soil to get that started, and I don't know how much there is of that. But if there is a will, there is a way.

If I had to do this without buying soil materials I guess I'd do the lasagna thing with cardboard. There is certainly plenty of that around.

JD is not a peak oil critic rather he is a misanthrope and a egotist. His point was not that cities are more efficient (anything is more efficient than the American Exurbs) but rather that 'doomerss' are naive romantics. That is absolute BS. We undestand planetary and technologic limits and are willing to commit to personal and social change for the good of ourselves, children and future generations.

You have not studied Kunstler and probably have not been to Paris. A well-designed and implemented City is a beautiful, enlightening and delightful place to be. But then how would an American ever know this if they have not traveled. Our cities were gutted by the automotive cartels.

Here I wholeheartedly agree with you.

You are correct. Cities are not solutions, but they are better than the burbs. Neither living arrangement places humans on the ground in the field and that is the only way that nutrients and information can cycle between humans and the food source. And such cycling is imperative to ecological farming methods, and to a sustainable human living system. We must learn how to recycle and reuse not just our own industrial materials but our own bodily fluids. Sounds gross huh? Rather we all die?

there are no tactics here, not from me. I am not prescribing solutions, only describing prediciments and I know that how Kunstler sees himself. I listen to his podcasts, all of them, and I have read and studied all his books, especially the "Geography of Nowhere"

It is a matter of scale. Try this as an exercise. You put down 1 foot of topsoil on the concrete. Now extrapolate and place that much on an acre, the amount of land that USDA says is necessary to feed a person.

How much does it weigh?

Here is another: how many truckloads to transport that top soil to cover the acre?

Dirt is a commodity too. I think that asphalt would shrink down to a minimum and gardens would sprout if gas got expensive and people needed to garden.

You can grow a lot of food in a little space.