Check out this article by Wylie Harris: Lawn to Farm: Suburbia’s Silver Lining.
More than with the article itself, which is pretty good, I’m impressed with the number (24 as of today) and content of comments posted by readers. More evidence that local food is becoming a mainstream topic all across the country. And look how many mentions of Cuba and of “The Power of Community” (which Sustainable Ballard screened last spring at the Sunset Hill Community Association, too).
There is only one aspect of the article that I found a little less thought through: when suburbanites water 30 million acres of lawn, they are using the same kind of energy that will doom our industrial agriculture, namely for pumping the water. Fortunately, as some commenters have pointed out, some permaculture practices are designed for keeping the soil moist, reflect sunlight, and use less water.
Posted on January 25th, 2008 by fulvio
Filed under: Uncategorized
your point about pumping water is a good one. however, pumping water to grow food is MUCH preferable to pumping (or even using) water to grow lawns. conceivably, the food grown in your yard would be food not supplied by an agribusiness farm and could balance out in water and energy usage. actually, i would think it would be a net gain since the amount of water wasted is probably less and the energy used is probably more manual than petro-driven farm equipment.
I’m just wondering how much energy is required to pump and distribute the water that ends up in lawns (that could be turned into productive food plots).
If water were plentiful in our neck of the woods, we wouldn’t see all those “Free Ballard” stickers, after all…