There is a gem of an article on Mother Jones about sustainable farming and sustainability, in general (via the Vine). There are a lot of good points in this article, but four that stuck with me are:
1. Buying power
It’s not that we lack enthusiasm—activist foodies represent one of the most potent market forces on the planet. Unfortunately, a lot of that conscientious buying power is directed toward conceptions of sustainable food that may be out of date.
2. Practical Sustainability
We can’t wait for the perfect solution to emerge; we need to start transforming the food system today—most probably with hybrid models, like Fleming’s or Liebman’s, that take the best of both alternative and mainstream technologies and acknowledge not only the complexity of true sustainability but the practical reality that the perfect is often the enemy of the good.
3. Wal-Mart can play a role
The nation’s grocery chains have about 32,500 acres of potential “farmland”; a single Wal-Mart supercenter sits under more than four acres of rooftop—enough, according to Agoada, to produce 5.7 tons of wheat a year.
4. The need for subsidies
The reason federal farm subsidies are regarded as anti-sustainability is mainly because they support the wrong kind of farming. But if we want the right kind of farming, we’re going to have to support those farmers willing to risk trying a new model.
The Center for Democracy and Technology has been releasing Congressional Research Reports on theopencrs.com. Just last week, they released a great primer on green building by Eric Fischer called, Issues in Green Building and Federal Response: an Introduction. In it, he cites some staggering numbers on the environmental impact of building:
- Residential buildings in the US account for more than 20% of our energy consumption
- Building demolition and construction account for 60% of the non-industrial waste in the US (in 1996). Only 25% of it is recovered through recycling.
- Buildings produce 40% of the CO2 emissions in the US and that number is climbing.
So, it seems to become more energy-efficient, we need to figure out how to build (and tear down) more efficiently. However, building efficiently isn’t the only answer,
The location of a building can have significant transportation and ecological impacts. For example, if an organization constructs a new green building for its offices, but chooses a location with no access to public transportation, the additional energy required for transportation by private vehicle may exceed energy savings from the operation of the building itself.
Which is why selection of the site is a part of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. In light of that, it would be great to see some well-sited projects like
Loblolly. Loblolly was built in 2007 by Kieran Timberlake Architects and is a residence on Taylor’s Island, MD. The house was built with prefab materials and only takes a wrench to assemble, once the materials are delivered to the site. It can also be completely disassembled leaving the prefabbed pieces whole — if they are reused then there is no waste. All of the materials came from within 500 miles of the site
and the builders have gone so far as to incorporate the trees from the site into the foundation. Imagine if we could get this type of building philosophy integrated into an environment with an existing public transportation infrastructure. It looks like from the
KTA blog, that this dream is becoming a reality in New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward.
