Tag Archives: urban agriculture

July 2015 in Review

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I’m experimenting with my +3/-3 rating system again this month, just to convey the idea that not all stories are equal in importance. The result is that July was a pretty negative month! Whether that reflects more the state of the world or the state of my mind, or some combination, you can decide.

Negative stories (-21):

  • In The Dead Hand, I learned that the risk of nuclear annihilation in the 1980s was greater than I thought, and the true story of Soviet biological weapons production was much worse than I thought. (-3)
  • Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others, are concerned about a real-life Terminator scenario. (-2)
  • I playfully pointed out that the Pope’s encyclical contains some themes that sound like the more lucid paragraphs in the Unabomber Manifesto, namely that the amoral pursuit of technology has improved our level of material comfort and physical health while devastating the natural world, creating new risks, and leaving us feeling empty somehow. (-1)
  • Bumblebees are getting squeezed by climate change. (-1)
  • The Cold War seems to be rearing its ugly head. (-2)
  • There may be a “global renaissance of coal”. (-3)
  • Joel Kotkin and other anti-urban voices like him want to make sure you don’t have the choice of living in a walkable community. (-2)
  • I think Obama may be remembered as an effective, conservative president, in the dictionary sense of playing it safe and avoiding major mistakes. Navigating the financial crisis, achieving some financial and health care reforms, and defusing several wars and conflicts are probably his greatest achievements. However, if a major war or financial crisis erupts in the near future that can be traced back to decisions he made, his legacy will suffer whether it is fair or not. (-0)
  • We can think of natural capital as a battery that took a long time to charge and has now been discharged almost instantly. (-3)
  • James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations. (-3)
  • Lloyd’s of London has spun a scenario of how a food crisis could play out. (-1)

Positive stories (+7):

turn your lawn into a food forest

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Mother Earth News tells us how to turn our lawns into food forests. Let’s do it!

Saturdays that could be spent harvesting berries and fresh greens are instead consumed in the toil of pushing a machine. Unless you are an avid yogi, baseball player or picnicker, lawns are a bit passé. And yet, we as a nation spend over $26 billion per year on lawns. How might we redesign our spaces to create edible abundance? …

A food forest has multiple layers which are able to coexist. Rather than have just the main fruit tree crop, a food forest is designed to have an upper story (large fruit trees), and secondary upper-story (dwarf fruit trees) a shrub layer (berry bushes) an herb layer (leafy greens and veggies) and a ground cover layer (strawberries and low herbs). In this way, one creates a dynamic polyculture that has diverse crops in production. This makes sense if our intention is to grow for our own community.

A food forest also plants the fringes. The gaps between production plants are great areas for nitrogen fixing beans and peas. These plants feed the soil and create a living mulch. The marginal areas can be planted in flowers and pollinator attracting native plants, serving as magnates that attract beneficial insects into the garden.

June 2015 in Review

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Negative stories:

Positive stories:

vegetable rain gardens

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Growing food in rain gardens – it seems almost too obvious. But it isn’t done much, and somebody has gone to the trouble of studying it scientifically here. They planted “beetroot, onion, spinach, tomato and broad bean”. This sounds good, but it might be fun to experiment with trees and other perennial species. There are some tough plants out there that will tolerate wet and dry conditions better than your typical annual garden crops. Jerusalem artichoke comes to mind, which is a sort of invasive American prairie flower that produces enormous amounts of delicious potato-like tubers.

April 2015 in Review

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Negative stories:

Positive stories:

  • Mr. Money Mustache brought us a nice post on home energy efficiency projects. This was a very popular post.
  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.
  • Lee Kuan Yew, who took Singapore “from third world to first” in one generation, passed away (in March, but I wrote about it in April. Let me be clear – I am an admirer and it is his life I am putting in the positive column, not his death.)
  • Donella Meadows explained how your bathtub is a dynamic system.
  • Robert Gordon offers a clear policy prescription for the U.S. to support continued economic growth.
  • I explain how a cap-and-trade program for stormwater and pollution producing pavement could work.
  • Joel Mokyr talks about advances in information technology, materials science and biotechnology.
  • Some U.S. cities are fairly serious about planting trees.
  • Edmonton has set a target of zero solid waste.
  • Saving water also saves energy. It’s highly logical, but if you are the skeptical type then here are some numbers. Also, urban agriculture reduces carbon emissions.
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)
  • A paper in Ecological Economics tries to unify the ecological footprint and planetary boundary concepts.
  • Philadelphia finally has bike share.

urban agriculture and carbon emissions

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Here’s an article from Landscape and Urban Planning making a connection between urban agriculture and greenhouse gas emission reductions. It makes sense – any food that comes from nearby will reduce transportation energy use, air pollution, and carbon emissions. We could either decide to do this for ethical reasons, or we could build more of those external costs in the price. It probably makes sense to do some of each.

The expansion of urban agriculture assists in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions not only by producing food but also by reducing the amount of food transported from farming areas and therefore reducing the food mileage. This study seeks to estimate “the expected GHG reduction effect” in the case of a revitalization of urban agriculture. For this purpose, this study first calculated the area available for urban farming by targeting the metropolitan area of Seoul and then calculated the production per unit area by focusing on “the crops suitable for urban agriculture”. Using this estimated value, the study estimated crop production, the resultant food mileage decrement, and the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that could be obtained if the Seoul metropolis introduced urban agriculture. The results estimated that if the Seoul metropolis implemented urban agriculture in a 51.15 km2 area, it would be possible to reduce CO2 emissions by 11.67 million kg annually. This numerical value is the same amount of CO2 absorbed annually by 20.0 km2 of pine forests and 10.2 km2 of oak tree forests that are 20 years old. From the perspective of GHG reduction effects in the transportation sector, urban agriculture is expected to produce a considerable effect in diverse aspects such as the habituation of green growth, self-sufficiency, and food security.

green infrastructure, happiness, and the ginkgo-stinkgo tree

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Do trees make people happy? Well yes, I think most people subjectively just have a sense this is true. But for the cynics out there, there is also hard scientific evidence. People have tried all sorts of economic approaches – correlations with real estate markets and willingness-to-pay surveys – for example, to try to estimate the value people place on trees. (Can you measure happiness in dollars? The average man on the street might say no, but the average economist might say it’s the best of many imperfect options for measuring value.) Medical researchers have tried having people walk around cities with brain scanners on their heads. This is a new one to me though – correlating tree coverage with antidepressant prescriptions. And the correlation is there.

Growing evidence suggests an association between access to urban greenspace and mental health and wellbeing. Street trees may be an important facet of everyday exposure to nature in urban environments, but there is little evidence regarding their role in influencing population mental health. In this brief report, we raise the issue of street trees in the nature-health nexus, and use secondary data sources to examine the association between the density of street trees (trees/km street) in London boroughs and rates of antidepressant prescribing. After adjustment for potential confounders, and allowing for unmeasured area-effects using Bayesian mixed effects models, we find an inverse association, with a decrease of 1.18 prescriptions per thousand population per unit increase in trees per km of street (95% credible interval 0.00, 2.45). This study suggests that street trees may be a positive urban asset to decrease the risk of negative mental health outcomes.

And in other urban tree news, you can collect ginkgo berries, take out the nuts, roast them and eat them. The only problem being that they stink to high heaven and are mildly poisonous. Ginkgos are very interesting trees though, sort of an ancient cross between trees and ferns if you believe this article.

Believed to be truly indigenous to only a single province in China , this 270 million year old species belongs to an ancient lineage of species that have since disappeared for one reason or another over the past few millennia, making Ginkgo biloba (known as a ‘living fossil’) the sole extant representative of what was once a vast and diverse group of organisms. In fact, the ginkgo tree is so unlike any other living plant species that this tree has it’s own genus, family, order, class and division. To put this into terms that may be easier to conceptualize: the only thing that ginkgo trees have in common with other plants is they are also plants. This means that pretty much everything about their genetic make-up, physiology, general behavior, reproductive strategies (including their mobile sperm; a trait particular to ferns, cycads and algae) and even their ability to photosynthesize is anywhere between slightly-off to fundamentally different from any other living plant. Oh, and you can eat it’s seeds…

It’s a bit of a messy operation collecting the seeds which are often produced profusely by female trees and lie unmolested by fungi, insects or most pests of any kind save for some adventurous squirrels which occasionally eat the seeds. I find some rubber or latex gloves and a plastic bag are your best bet for collecting the seeds in addition to some grubby clothes that you don’t mind smelling cheesy for a little while. The scent from the fruit tends to linger when it gets on fabric or clothing and so you might want to try extra hard to remember not to wear anything that you are particularly fond of when engaging in the participatory act of ginkgo seed collecting.

I think it’s cool that some people do this, but I personally am not going to take up this hobby right now.

Geoff Lawton

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Here’s a Youtube play list of 200 videos with Geoff Lawton the Permaculture guy. I’ve embedded just one below.

Permaculture is great – it’s about sustainable agriculture and sustainable living in the dictionary sense of sustainability – entwined ecosystems and human settlements that can work together and persist for the long term. On a more practical level, it’s about farms and gardens that function as self-sustaining ecosystems, feeding people with very low inputs of energy and effort. The only possible criticism of it might be that perhaps its scientific core could be shored up a bit. But it really is a system-based ecological design philosophy that could be incorporated into a lot of mainstream programs, from small-scale farming to large-scale agribusiness to urban parks and trees.