[mark]

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

[Ibon]

That flowing into the city has two sources. Population excess and economic opportunities.

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

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.

[Pops]

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

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.

[Ibon]

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

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.

[Pops]

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/

[Revi]

It's hard for me to see a return to peasantry in the US and other developed countries, no matter how poor they get. Because in virtually all of the poorest countries in the world today, like Haiti, they are undergoing rapid urbanization.

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

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/

[mos6507]

Screw JD

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.

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

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.

[Revi]

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.

[JohnDenver]

Some more realworld info on how rural areas get mauled by high gas prices:

Soaring gas prices are a double-whammy for many rural residents: They often pay more than people who live in cities and suburbs because of the expense of hauling fuel to their communities, and they must drive greater distances for life's necessities: work, groceries, medical care and, of course, gas.

Meanwhile, incomes typically are lower in rural areas, making increasingly high gas prices an especially urgent concern. Rural households also are more likely to have older, less fuel-efficient vehicles such as pickups, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) says. The average age of a vehicle in a rural household: 8.7 years, compared with 7.9 years for an urban vehicle.

Rural residents do more driving, too — an average of 3,100 miles a year more than urban dwellers, the FHWA says.

A May survey by the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS), a fuel analysis company, and Wright Express, a company that collects data on credit card transactions, found that people in rural areas spend as much as 16.02% of their monthly family income on gas, while people in urban areas of New York and New Jersey spend as little as 2.05%.

I haven't looked it up again, but there was an article on TOD quite a while ago about gas stations closing in rural regions, forcing people to drive long distances for gas -- which can turn into a nasty EROEI situation. Here's some reporting in the same vein:

When the only gas station in Allen, Neb., closed last summer, a gallon of gas cost $2.56, according to prices posted on two abandoned pumps. Since then, Allen's 411 residents have been driving 11 miles to Wakefield or 28 miles to South Sioux City to fill up.

Allen's grocery store went out of business last August, forcing people to shop in South Sioux City or 21 miles away in Wayne. Doctors, dentists and other essentials also require a road trip. The nearest movie theater is in Wayne.

"You have to leave town for about everything," says Jerry Schroeder, an insurance agent who has lived in Allen for all of his 57 years.

The above quotes are from another summer 2008 article, High gas prices threaten to shut down rural towns.

Here's still more reporting in the same vein:

These days, they're also cussing and shaking their heads about the price of that gasoline. People are doing that everywhere, but in small towns such as Leeton, population 619, it's even more of a gut punch because nearly every working adult commutes to jobs elsewhere.

These days, there had better be a really good job on the other end of that trip.

Don Campbell's daily commute to Kansas City - about 100 miles each way - costs him roughly $866 a month at $3.90 per gallon. But he's a union iron worker and says he can make the math work.

Most of his neighbors can't. For them and thousands of other small-town residents across the country who drive long distances to jobs that pay little more than minimum wage, the high cost of gas is making that daily commute cost-prohibitive.

So much so that economists predict that over the next few years, the country could see a migration that would greatly reduce the population of Small Town America - resulting in a painful shift away from lifestyle, family roots, traditions and school ties.

from High Gas Prices Threaten to Drain Small Towns' Populations.

These are very serious problems caused by high oil prices, not in suburbs or exurbs (as Pstarr is misreading) but in the country, i.e. rural America, i.e. the sticks. If you think about it, it's just a straightforward extension of Kunstler's logic. The suburbs will die because they are too oil dependent. Therefore, the rural areas will die even quicker because they are even more oil dependent.

Here's more reporting:
Rural drivers feeling rise in gas prices more than their urban counterparts
Gas prices hit harder in rural areas: It's even worse in rural areas like Bickleton, where driving is a necessity
High Gas Prices Hit Rural Poor Hardest
Rural Residents Struggle with High Gas Tab[
Fuel prices rocket in rural areas

Ibon and Pops, I know you are idealistic well-intentioned people, but I think you're in denial about the realities described by these articles. I think it would be very valuable if guys like you actually read the articles I've cited, fully digested the problems, and then addressed them, rather than just trying to bluff your way through on idealism.

Naturally if you don't have to work or you're wealthy, then moving to a rural area may be a great response to peak oil. I'm not talking about such people. Likewise, if you can be extremely self-sufficient, and perhaps squat on some land, then my critique doesn't apply.

But if you're a working person who needs income to live or to build up a doomstead, it seems to me that going rural is jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Pops, I read your link from "Community Solutions". Here's Megan's business plan for local food:

Structures of Local Food

Now, local food systems look very different from conventional food systems. We're not going to have local food supermarkets. So what are the distribution mechanisms of local food systems?

Well, a variety of structures is a good way to go. We have on-farm and in-town vegetable stands operated by farmers, farmers' markets, fairs, CSA or Community-Supported Agriculture farm subscription programs, cooperatives, and direct sales from farmers to consumers, to name a few. Importantly, there is a human element in local food systems. Direct relationships are developed between those who grow the food and those who eat it. We should embrace that.

That's it. Unfortunately, as I showed above, all of these marketing structures are horrendously inefficient and car dependent, and in fact use as much or more fuel per pound of product than flying vegetables thousands of miles. I think you've conceded that point.

The issue isn't reducing carbon, or being green. I too don't really care about the carbon/environment angle, and apparently neither do you. However, logically speaking, I think you have to concede that -- if your business model (farmer's markets, farm tourism etc.) is at least as fuel intensive as the 3000 mile salad -- then peak oil is going to kill it straight off.

Now, there may be some idealistic endpoint, where the US looks more like rural Thailand. Unfortunately, you don't seem to have a real roadmap which solves the economic issues (e.g., in the 3rd world, subsistence farmers own their land hereditarily, while in the US land is private property and must be purchased or rented -- big difference). You seem to be mainly handwaving about how the rural US might work well someday, if it gets repopulated and undergoes an amazing transformation. Of course, you may be right, and that may happen in the long term.

But I'm talking about events in the near to medium future, like the next wave of high oil prices. The question isn't whether rural America will survive in the long term. Of course it will. The question is: Can working back-to-the-country POers survive a series of oil price spikes? I don't think they can because:

a) If they try the local food business model/dream, they'll get mauled by gasoline prices, just like the 3000 mile salad, and

b) if they try to work a job in the country, they'll get mauled by gasoline prices, due to low wages, lack of job opportunities, long commutes, and need to drive long distances for necessities.

[Pops]

Way back there when I said suburbs were just a veneer about as thick as asphalt I was really talking about the fact that although they do have infrastructure, in 'burbs it isn't nearly of the scale the big modern cities have so adapting a strip center intersection for example to higher density, mixed use, with light rail and within walking distance of homes could be very doable.

I had a great site showing depictions of various stages of retrofitting such a place but can't seem to find it now - here is a google search.


http://www.vestaviahills.net/vestaviahi ... NDIX_2.pdf
http://www.smartgrowth.org/about/princi ... e=4&type=4

[JohnDenver]

But I don't think they will. I think energy will become more and more expensive and basic calorie crops like wheat, corn, beans and staples like sugar, salt & coffee will occupy a larger and larger portion of the food budget because the way to grow them most efficiently will continue to be large scale and people will be forced to pay the price.

But as bulk transport becomes prohibitively expensive the only way the average family will have fresh fruits and vegetables will be either to raise it themselves or buy it from the local guy who can grow it by hand and transport it by foot.

If wheat, corn, beans etc. will continue to be grown, processed and transported large scale, what makes fruits and vegetables any different? Why will bulk transport be prohibitively expensive for f&v but not for other items, like beans?

[Pops]

You seem to be mainly handwaving about how the rural US might work well someday, if it gets repopulated and undergoes an amazing transformation. Of course, you may be right, and that may happen in the long term.

I don't know if I'm hand-waving but that is exactly what I hope to see happen because I don't see much choice.

The question isn't whether rural America will survive in the long term. Of course it will. The question is: Can working back-to-the-country POers survive a series of oil price spikes? I don't think they can...

Well, John I don't get it, if people are going to survive in the country in the long term that pretty well means they need to survive in the medium and short term as well, correct? They aren't just going to wander out there in 30 years or however long horseback and start turning soil.

[Pops]

If wheat, corn, beans etc. will continue to be grown, processed and transported large scale, what makes fruits and vegetables any different? Why will bulk transport be prohibitively expensive for f&v but not for other items, like beans?

Come on john, because people need calories not salads.

[Pops]

BTW, thanks for all the links but it's pretty obvious people who commute long distances to work/school/etc. are going to have problems. At least 3 of my close neighbors went out and bought smaller vehicles last year and parked their big dually pickups. I don't see many full size pickups go by at commute times now.

Weren't you talking a while back about how easy it is to cut one's fuel bill in half or more by carpooling? We haven't even started to scratch the surface of conservation out here in Redneck land!


Sorry, I know that looks like a Blazer.gov...

[mos6507]

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.

Then either ignore him entirely or respond to him on point. Don't just resort to ad homs.

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.

I think Boston is kind of nice too, as long as you stay out of Dorchester or Mattapan. I lived in the brownstones in the Back Bay when I was in college. I just saw the fireworks at the hatch shell. It's nice. I just don't think a hasty retreat to the city in the midst of energy descent is going to lead to any sort of paradise. I don't think there will be the kind of free-flowing capital to transform the cities in a way that allow them to accomodate all these people comfortably. There may also not be enough resources in general to support the infrastructure such an abrupt population spike would require.

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.

David Holmgren is a pretty strong proponent in reforming the suburbs rather than abandoning it. So I'm not so sure we should write off its potential. How practical that is, is another matter. I certainly don't see a lot of evidence of the right kind of things starting up in my town currently.

These debates always go around in circles and get very repetitive. I certainly don't think a growing population can afford not to fully utilitize all of the land area that is available. Certainly the suburbs will be used for something whether the people there now stay or leave.

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?

Soil is not just this magic thing that nature created hundreds of years ago and can never be replaced.

How much cardboard is produced on a yearly basis? How much organic waste? How much humanure? How many tons of newspapers? How much yard waste compost? (visit my local dump and see the mountains of it) Soil can be created on a massive scale from our waste streams if we really want to do what it takes. Sharon Astyk goes so far as to promote "Soylent Fertilizer". She doesn't call it that, but that's pretty much what it amounts to. If the world is a closed system and human biomass is our main resource, then we're going to have to make better use of it.

[mos6507]

Luckily the vegetable part of the mix is something doable in a small scale. It's the meat and staples that are the problem.

[green_achers]

Someone a while back asked for a model. I suggest he look into Von Thunen. Working in the early-mid 1800's, he theorized a series of concentric circles of economic productivity around population centers. Food growing is one of the most inner circles. He was, of course, working long before cheap fossil fuel-driven transportation, so his model just might be valid for the post-peak world. One of the few things I have to show for that class in Economic Geography,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hei ... h%C3%BCnen

For my part, I grow on a few acres located about 5 miles from the city center where I sell at the downtown farmer's market. While I'm on the edge of the city limits, there is a lot of vacant land between me and the market. Market day is one day a week, and I would be happy to only come to town on that day. Bring in the produce, buy the week's supplies and socialize at the same time.

Now, I currently come into town more like 6 days a week rather than 1, usually for some needed supply or to get online. Still my "commute" is a lot shorter than when I lived in California. Pops has it exactly right. It's about doing what needs to be done now to set things up to have a more sustainable life when it gets more necessary. (Sorry if I incorrectly paraphrased you, Pops.) I already tried the self-sacrifice route and, while I don't regret trying to do the right thing back when it looked like there might be a chance of bringing society along, I'm done with that. I'll use whatever resources I have available to get up and running, and I'm not going to make myself or the people in my life miserable in the process.