Community Action Plans - Food & Water

This is the first of a series of essays about what communities need to be doing to get ready for the future, considering the various economic, environmental and energy-related problems our civilization is facing. Be sure not to miss upcoming installments by subscribing to the Sustainable Future website (it is free, of course). The sign-up box can be found at the top of the right-hand column.

Local Sustainable Agriculture

Most of the food that citizens of Western nations eat is trucked or flown in from all over the world. For many people, the piece of fruit that they will eat today is much more a world-traveler than they are. In my local grocery stores (I'm in NC, USA) there are fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as frozen and canned goods, from places as far away as Chile, Peru, Argentina and the Philippines.

But what if you suddenly couldn't import your community's food from all over the globe? Could your community survive on only the food produced locally? The fact is there are many reasons why you may not be able to import large quantities of food in the future - everything from peak oil and sky-rocketing energy prices to world-wide food shortages to crop failures caused by disease or drought.

Communities should encourage people to produce a portion of their own food. This can be done by reviving the Victory Gardens idea of the first two world wars. Communities should also do everything possible to promote local sustainable agriculture.

Ways to Encourage Local Food Production

1. Promote the idea Victory Gardens (both private and community-based) and food co-ops.
   
2. Provide training courses in gardening and permaculture through local community colleges and agricultural extension offices.
3. Remove unnecessary restrictions on people growing their own food (maintaining needed restrictions to promote health & safety and prevent animal cruelty).
4. Remove unnecessary restrictions on local farmers selling their crops to local markets (often put in place due to lobbying by big agri-business).
5. Require that government food services (such as school lunch programs) spend an increasing portion of their budgets on locally produced food.
6. Encourage the formation of farmers markets.
7. Local relief agencies should provide vouchers or special debit cards for use at local farmers markets as part of their assistance programs.
8. Promote the health, economic and environmental benefits of low-meat diets (educational programs only - what people eat should be their choice).
9. Public tree-planting programs should include fruit and nut trees.
10. Support programs to capture organic waste (food scraps, animal & human manure, leaves & other yard waste, agricultural waste) for composting to improve soils.

Water Systems

Clean water is the invisible crisis and providing continuing supplies of clean water for local communities is perhaps the biggest challenge of the 21st century. Did you know that as much as a third of a typical city's water usage is flushing toilets? Various types of dry and composting toilets can greatly reduce this inefficient use of clean water. One of the shopping malls in my local area recently installed dry-flush urinals in its public restrooms, and they seem to be working perfectly.

Leaking pipes, not just in homes and businesses, but in the local water systems themselves, is a major problem that wastes huge amounts of water. Detection and elimination of such leaks should be a high priority. (Water conservation is the theme of two editions of my Resource Miser newsletters, RM #004 and RM #011.)

Local governments can also encourage water conservation by charging less per gallon to customers that use less water. In other words, a household that uses 100 gallons a month would be charged less per gallon than a household that uses 1000 gallons a month.

In my area, the water supply comes from two main sources - a lake and an nearby river. Local governments have actually been fairly pro-active in protecting these sources. Over the years they have surrounded the lake with a large municipal park, protecting it from development and pollution. And they have worked diligently protecting the river through a series of parks and conservation easements. Local governments depending on the river for water have come together to hire a "River Keeper" whose job is to patrol the river looking for illegal dumping and other threats.

Also in my area they are a couple of days a year (one is typically Earth Day and the other in the Fall) that are promoted as "waterway clean-up days". Individuals and community groups are encouraged to clean trash out of out local ponds, streams and wetland areas. This is heavily promoted in the local media, and local governments provide trucks and workers to haul off the trash that is collected.

Organic gardening, lasagna-style gardening, forest gardening and similar techniques utilizing compost and natural soil amendments instead of chemical fertilizers will protect local water supplies from dangerous chemical run-off. Also, these techniques typically utilize mulch and other ground cover which greatly reduces surface evaporation thus reducing the need for irrigation.

The Myopic "Doom & Gloom" Crowd

Science Proves Optimistic People Have a More Realistic Perception of the World Than Negative People

I've been dealing with sustainability issues for close to twenty years now. At first it was various environmental issues that motivated me. Later, I became aware of the ramifications of peak oil and resource scarcity in general. Of late, I am deeply concerned about economic and agricultural issues.

Over the years I've talked to many people about these issues and the need for sustainability. I've been actively discussing these issues on the Internet since 2004, in various chat groups, email groups and so forth.

During that time I have remained positive and upbeat, believing that mankind will eventfully overcome these issues, if we can just avoid destroying our civilization first. My approach to sustainability can best be described as doing whatever it takes (energy & resource efficiency, permaculture, reforestation, renewable energy, etc.) to buy us time to develop and implement scientific and technological solutions (ranging from space based solar energy production to mining the resources of the solar system to eventually becoming a true space-faring civilization.

In promoting my vision, particularly via the Internet, I have run into a variety of people that didn't share my optimism for the future or my enthusiasm for science & technology. Instead, they tend to have a quite negative outlook, something sometimes referred to as "doom and gloom."

For many of these people there simply is no hope for overcoming our problems and the only way to escape disaster is to revert back to some sort of pre-industrial/pre-technological past. Of course, this necessitates greatly reducing the population (without modern technology, there is simply no way to support six to eight billion people on this planet).

Many of these people hope to stabilize and reduce world population in a managed way, while others look towards an inevitable "great die-off" in the not-to-distant future. Most of the later folk look towards the die-off with understandable fear, but a few seem to eagerly embrace the idea as providing a fresh start for mankind.

In talking/debating these negative people, I have always been frustrated by what I considered to be their very narrow world view. They seem to only see the problems and challenges, and are never willing to look at the possibilities and opportunities. Whenever I bring up a reason to be optimistic, they tend to either ignore it or to dismiss it out of hand. They only see the negative, and that is all they want to see (or so it seemed to me). In short, their worldview always seemed quite myopic to me.

Well, science has proved me right. Negative people are myopic. A negative mindset does affect the way the brain functions, diminishing the negative person's ability to take in information about the world around them.

Dr. Adam Anderson, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, has examined brain activation levels with the fMRI scans, comparing brain activity of positive, happy optimistic people with that of pessimistic, unhappy negative people.

His findings: It turns out that people in a positive mood took in more information about the world around them, while people in a negative mood took in less.

In other words, negative people are myopic. They only process a limited amount of information (information that supports their negative view) compared to positive people. Positive people, on the other hand, take in and process more information, therefore have a more complete and realistic view of the world.

My gut feeling that negative people, the "doom and gloom" crowd, do have a narrow world view has now been proven by science to be correct. Negative people do fail to take in and consider all the relevant information, instead processing only that information which reinforces their negativity, which is something I've long suspected.

So today's bit of advice: Be optimistic, it is more realistic!

Rethinking Food Production for a World of 8 Billion

Here is the most recent press release from Lester Brown and the Earth Policy Institute.

Rethinking Food Production for a World of Eight Billion

http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/Seg/PB3ch09_ss1.htm

Lester R. Brown

In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly
announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the
year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people
were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has
China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become
the world’s third largest food aid donor.

The key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that
dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production
teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was
allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of
land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural
population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its
fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing,
and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger
in less than a decade--in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter
period of time than any country in history.

While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading
throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and
parts of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the number of people in
developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical
low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today. Part of this recent
rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic
crisis. In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people
in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.

Dealing with this problem requires addressing the long-term trends leading
to growth in demand for food outpacing growth in supply. One key to the
threefold expansion in the world grain harvest since 1950 was the rapid
adoption in some developing countries of high-yielding wheats and rices
(originally developed in Japan) and hybrid corn (from the United States).
The spread of these highly productive seeds, combined with a tripling of
irrigated area and an 11-fold increase in world fertilizer use, tripled
the world grain harvest. Growth in irrigation and fertilizer use
essentially removed soil moisture and nutrient constraints on much of the
world’s cropland.

Now the outlook is changing. Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of
irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use,
rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm
uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising
technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for
farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the
desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and
the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement
tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists
are now being thoroughly challenged.

The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated
loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide.
Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1
percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From
1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually. This is partly
because the yield response to the additional application of fertilizer is
diminishing and partly because irrigation water is limited.

This calls for fresh thinking on how to raise cropland productivity. One
way is to breed crops that are more tolerant of drought and cold. U.S.
corn breeders have developed corn varieties that are more
drought-tolerant, enabling corn production to move westward into Kansas,
Nebraska, and South Dakota. Kansas, the leading U.S. wheat-producing
state, has used a combination of drought-resistant varieties in some areas
and irrigation in others to expand corn planting to where the state now
produces more corn than wheat.

Another way of raising land productivity, where soil moisture permits, is
to increase the area of multicropped land that produces more than one crop
per year. Indeed, the tripling in the world grain harvest since 1950 is
due in part to impressive increases in multiple cropping in Asia. Some of
the more common combinations are wheat and corn in northern China, wheat
and rice in northern India, and the double or triple cropping of rice in
southern China and southern India.

The spread in double cropping of winter wheat and corn on the North China
Plain helped boost China’s grain production to where it rivaled that of
the United States. Winter wheat grown there yields 5 tons per hectare.
Corn also averages 5 tons. Together these two crops, grown in rotation,
can yield 10 tons per hectare per year. China’s double cropped rice
annually yields 8 tons per hectare.

Forty years ago, North India produced only wheat, but with the advent of
the earlier maturing high-yielding wheats and rices, wheat could be
harvested in time to plant rice. This wheat/rice combination is now widely
used throughout the Punjab, Haryana, and parts of Uttar Pradesh. This
practice yields a combined 5 tons of grain per hectare, helping to feed
India’s 1.2 billion people.

A concerted U.S. effort to both breed earlier maturing varieties and
develop cultural practices that would facilitate multiple cropping could
substantially boost crop output. If China’s farmers can extensively double
crop wheat and corn, then U.S. farmers could do the same if agricultural
research and farm policy were reoriented to support it.

Elsewhere, Western Europe, with its mild winters and high-yielding winter
wheat, might also be able to double crop more with a summer grain, such as
corn, or with a winter oilseed crop. Brazil and Argentina have an extended
frost-free growing season that supports extensive multicropping, often
wheat or corn with soybeans.

In many countries, including the United States, most of those in Western
Europe, and Japan, fertilizer use has reached a level where using more has
little effect on crop yields. There are still some places, however, such
as most of Africa, where additional fertilizer would help boost yields.
Unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa lacks the infrastructure to transport
fertilizer economically to the villages where it is needed. As a result of
nutrient depletion, grain yields in much of sub-Saharan Africa are
stagnating.

One encouraging response to this situation in Africa is the simultaneous
planting of grain and leguminous trees. At first the trees grow slowly,
permitting the grain crop to mature and be harvested; then the saplings
grow quickly to several feet in height, dropping leaves that provide
nitrogen and organic matter, both sorely needed in African soils. The wood
is then cut and used for fuel. This simple, locally adapted technology,
developed by scientists at the International Centre for Research in
Agroforestry in Nairobi, has enabled farmers to double their grain yields
within a matter of years as soil fertility builds.

Despite local advances, the overall loss of momentum in expanding food
production is unmistakable. It will force us to think more seriously about
stabilizing population, moving down the food chain, and using the existing
harvest more productively. Achieving an acceptable worldwide balance
between food and people may now depend on stabilizing population as soon
as possible, reducing the unhealthily high consumption of animal products
among the affluent, and restricting the conversion of food crops to
automotive fuels. It also calls for a concerted effort to raise water use
productivity, similar to the gains achieved for land use, and to stabilize
climate to avoid crop-withering temperatures and more frequent droughts.
These efforts combined can help put us on the path to ensuring enough food
for all.

# # #

Adapted from Chapter 9, “Feeding Eight Billion Well,” in Lester R. Brown,
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at
www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm