Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
it can go back to the land. When each of these transmission costs is analysed separately it
appears slight. But when you add together all the extra costs that become necessary when
we house people so densely that there is not enough local solar energy or water to go round
- the transport, the refrigeration, the packaging, the heating, the street lighting, the clothes
drying, the waste disposal, the composting, the congestion, etc - they represent a sizable
proportion of our CO
2
emissions.
When these factors are taken into account, there is a
prima facie
case for reconsidering
our current urban settlement patterns. A more rural population would be closer to the
sources of food, and so would its sewage and waste disposal system. Enough rain falls on
people's roofs every year to supply virtually all their domestic needs and this, together with
local wells, springs, boreholes, and village-scale supplies that the water companies have
abandoned over the years, offers a more reliable source of water than the reservoirs and
aquifers which even in our rain-drenched country always seem to be on the brink of running
out. The small-scale wind generators which Monbiot points out would be impracticable
on town houses, could, he agrees, work fairly well in conjunction with solar panels in the
countryside. Building materials can be sourced, as they always used to be, only a stone's
throw from the site of the building, resulting in a genuine rediscovery of the vernacular
which modern architects can only imitate. And, to bring us back to where we began, loc-
al biomass - be it timber, SRC,
Miscanthus
, sawdust or hedgeclippings - instead of being
turned inefficiently into gigawatts, fed into the grid, and consumed at the flick of a switch,
can be harvested, distributed, consumed and managed in cords and faggots or chippings at
parish or district council level.
This is permaculture on the grand scale and a similar vision is proposed for the UK by
Patrick Whitefield:
In the long term we need to design truly sustainable settlements. This means cities
and towns which are small enough to get most of their resources locally. It also means
repopulating the countryside with new hamlets and smallholdings. More people will
work where they live, and more food and manufactured goods will be consumed near
where they're produced … The key to implementing permaculture in the countryside
is repopulation. This includes the breaking up of the present large, mechanized farms
into small farms, smallholdings and new hamlets, where energy-intensive production
can be replaced with design-intensive and human-attention-intensive production. As
well as farming and gardening there can be small-scale manufacturing in the coun-
tryside, mainly for local needs and/or using local resources, and people tele-working
from home. Many people will have polycultural incomes, usually involving some food
production.
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