I’ve actually given a lot of thought to the compost crop problem. I know it’s not much of a solution, but I considered the possibility of Portland having grow compost crops on all publicly owned land. Of course, the area would never support the numbers it does now, but it may provide some sort of solution. If this were somehow implemented, then perhaps people would only have to use 1/4 of their land, or maybe even less, to grow compost crops.

Of course, implementing something like this would take more than a small amount of beuracracy, but I could see it being done with fewer people than are now employed by the city (seeing as the personnel required to administer the electrical grid, sewer system and water distribution system would become either unnecessary, or be greatly reduced in number).

Portland proper’s land consists of 10% parks, and while some have suggested that this land could be used to grow food, I would suggest that it be used to grow the requisite compost crops, so that food growing could be spread out in people’s yards, and therefore more difficult for central authorities to control.

I got a job at Portland Parks and Rec so that I could eventually help to further a permaculture-based future for Portland. With an area as progressive and forward thinking as Portland, and as much publicly owned land as it has, I often think it just might be possible. We’ll all see how it goes.

- Chuck

The other form of edge I can think of is that Jeavons, being honest about inputs, notes that to grow food, you must grow compost. Thus each 100 sf of food garden needs 300-400sf of compost crops for fertility preservation. Most gardeners now just import their fertility from stables or stores, and that’s not sustainable. It would take a very altruistic soul to choose not to mine their soil’s fertility and instead grow 1/4 as much food on land that could, in the short run, yield much more, especially if their kids are hungry. And that’s the dilemma of agriculture.

If we remove the automobile from the suburb, what we have left is no longer in any recognizable sense suburbia.

I’ve enjoyed Jason and Taylor’s exchange about suburbia. In theory the land in suburbia could support maybe half or more of the residents there (just guessing based on lot size). But Jason has cut to the heart of the problem: suburbia without the commute is not suburbia. There is a cultural transformation required, and it’s in a very different direction than the social current of the last century. When Mom and Dad’s jobs disappear and they can’t drive to the office anymore, are they going to create a permaculture paradise, or just freak out? Or at best, try to garden conventionally and find that without fossil-based fertilizers and pesticides they can’t make it work for more than a few seasons. In my cornucopian fantasies I see suburbia returning to the small market gardens it was 40 years ago (where it wasn’t just river valley), but that requires a cultural shift that may be heyond most people. I don’t think suburbanites will just sit in front of their blank TVs and die, but they may well do the wrong things (like try to farm their whole yard) to survive. Again, who’s going to leave 3/4 of his yard fallow or in mulch crops when his kids are hungry? We’ve been working on temperate climate food forests for about 30 years now and are a long ways from making them work well and to deeply understand them. We’ll get there, but maybe not in time to have “Idiots Guide to Forest Gardens” available for former commuters.

Moreover, Jeavons’ techniques rely on edge. Two abutting biointensive gardens do not have edge, and it is the edge with forests, forest gardens, and wilderness that are most productive. To be functional, forests must have a minimum area much larger than a biointensive garden. In other words, what makes the biointensive garden so productive is not just its size, but its context: the things that surround it. You can’t simply multiply the per-acre yield times the number of acres, because if you put all of these biointensive fields next to each other, you destroy the very thing that makes them so productive—their edge.

Hmm. So are you saying that if, in that suburban community Taylor is talking about, if every suburban lot became a biointensive farm, they would not be able to function? Would a biointensive garden die without it’s “edge?”

This is the first time I have heard about biointensive requiring that “edge.” I read your citation with Jeff, and my question is: do you have any other citations, or other people who have proven this? I’m interested because this is the first time I’ve heard about “edge” as a requirement for this form of gardening (I haven’t heard about it on Jeavons’ site).

But, let’s consider the possibility of a transformation, starting from current suburbia, to something else, like a village. Could it be done without massive die-off?

First of all, as already mentioned, we’re beginning with the assumption of massive change. What will emerge will be nothing like the suburbs we know today, so already we’re accepting as a given that suburbs cannot survive in any recognizable form. That’s a significant starting point, since we’re basically saying from the start that the only way to make suburbs sustainable is to make them no longer suburbs. So that rather answers the question of suburban sustainability right there, doesn’t it?

Let’s take the example of Northbrook, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. Northbrook is quite homogeneous—nearly 90% white, with another 9% Asian. The median family income is $110,778. This is an incredibly wealthy neighborhood—the kind where simply living in it means well more than just the average 5.6 slaves. The ecological footprint we can assume is massive. The very first thing that Northbrook would need to do to become sustainable would be to suffer a massive cut in quality of life—they will need to transition from some of the wealthiest people of the First World to some of the poorest of the Third. This is unlikely to be a transition they will undergo voluntarily, or without much distress.

Now, if we take the most optimistic possibility, we come up with John Jeavons’ figure of 4,000 sq. ft./person, or 1 acre for every 10 people.¹ Let’s assume 10 people constitutes a household. In Northbrook, we see a housing density of 373.3/km², or about 1.51 houses per acre. So you wouldn’t have enough room for even the most optimistic projections. OK, so let’s say you tear down the schools, the churches, the businesses, everything and turn them all into gardens. Now we’re talking pure population density. 33.6km², or 361,667,389 sq. ft. to be divided amongst an estimated 34,190: 10,578.16 sq. ft. per person. Plenty of room for Jeavons’ biointensive farming approach!

Now, what does that mean? Jeavons’ estimates assumes that everyone eats a vegan diet,² which we already know can’t work on this kind of scale. Leaving animal products out of the equation entirely is a major assumption in Jeavons’ work.

For example, approximately 10,000 square feet are needed with such practices to produce an average complete vegetarian diet containing no animal products (22,000 to 43,000 square feet for an average American diet), but only about 2,000 square feet are needed to produce the same diet with Biointensive mini-farming. That can go a long way toward feeding increasing and hungry populations as the world works to decrease population growth to sustainable rates.³

Moreover, Jeavons’ techniques rely on edge.⁴ Two abutting biointensive gardens do not have edge, and it is the edge with forests, forest gardens, and wilderness that are most productive. To be functional, forests must have a minimum area much larger than a biointensive garden. In other words, what makes the biointensive garden so productive is not just its size, but its context: the things that surround it. You can’t simply multiply the per-acre yield times the number of acres, because if you put all of these biointensive fields next to each other, you destroy the very thing that makes them so productive—their edge.

Holmgren has a very optimistic view of how permaculture can help suburbs transition into something else: a horticultural village.

Most of the sustainability debate is focused within the “green-tech stability” scenario in which we essentially maintain a steady (albeit somewhat reduced) level of energy usage by progressively moving to renewable sources such as wind, solar, tidal power, etc., as fossil fuel reserves are used up.

While permaculture strategies mesh nicely with many of those directed towards this generally accepted desirable future, permaculture in fact defines a creative response to a fourth scenario that I call “Earth Stewardship”—a “creative descent” in which we progressively reduce our energy demands to return eventually to living within the natural energy and production budget of the land we occupy. Elements of all these scenarios can be found in the wide-ranging viewpoints and arguments of today’s “sustainability” debates.

In the Earth Stewardship “creative descent” scenario, which I consider to represent the only truly sustainable future, human society creatively descends the energy demand slope essentially as a ‘mirror image’ of the creative energy ascent that occurred between the onset of the industrial revolution and the present day.⁵

Most importantly, it should be noted that Holmgren isn’t offering permaculture as a way to maintain the status quo, but as a means of transitioning from our current unsustainable state, to essentially horticultural villages, without die-off. He may be overly optimistic even so, but it’s worth trying given the dire consequences of failure, and I have no doubt that as the crisis intensifies, more and more of his solutions will be implemented.

There tends to be a view that suburban development—spread out cities—are a product of the motorcar and cheap energy. And although that’s true, the suburban landscapes are no denser in human settlement than some of the denser settles of dense agricultural landscapes in the world. Now admittedly people living in those suburbs consume far more resources in total than people who lived in those densely settled agricultural landscapes. Somewhere like the Red River Delta in Vietnam has a higher density of people living more or less totally off that land than say, Australian suburbs. Of course they’re very special environments, they’re all fed by integrated water systems, it’s fertile, flat land, but similarly we can look at our suburbs and say they are an infrastructure. Our cities water system has the biggest articulated agricultural landscapes in Australia. So the water is there. We have an infrastructure of hard surfaces that actually harvests storm water, which is seen as a problem at the moment, which allows augmentation of natural rainfall to direct that water into the remaining areas that are potentially productive. We’ve got mostly individual houses that can be retrofitted to have solar access because they’re generally set far enough back from neighboring houses to get that. Now that might involve cutting down a lot of gum trees in those leafy suburbs, but there’s a lot of ways in which the suburbs can be incrementally retrofitted in an energy-descent world. ⁶

Holmgren makes my point for me. After listing all the ways in which suburbia is less adapted, the only comparison he can find is still the very image of unsustainability: agricultural villages.

So what does this mean for suburbia? Collapse, along with the civilization that created them, that they are dependent on, of course. What does collapse mean? It may mean die-off. That is probably the most likely event, even in the best case scenario. The best hope almost certainly lies in permaculture. Through massive sacrifice and a willingness to depart radically from an established way of life, suburbs have a slim chance of transitioning, with great distress but possibly without massive die-off, from wealthy First World suburbs, to isolated horticultural villages. Even in the best case scenario, though, their proximity to the cities puts them at enormous risk even if they do everything right. In short, while there is a slight chance for some suburbs to become functioning communities (if no longer recognizable as suburbs), it is not a plan that can really be recommended for its high chances of success. Still, retrofitting the suburbs into horticultural villages offers the last, best hope to those unwilling or unable to imagine a life truly beyond civilization.

In that light, what would you call towns larger than 5000 in the countryside? Cities? Towns? Small cities? What abut a city of 5,00 to 100,000, like Bloomington, Indiana which has 70,000 or Ann Arbor, Michigan, which has 100,000, or Hudson, Wisconsin, which as 11,000 people? Are those cities or small cities? Of course, small is subjective since cities that size would be big cities in ancient times, after all, so I would go with the term city. But I guess this is semantics–since with that logic, a suburb should be a city since most suburbs are more than 5000, and even if they aren’t, they are still surrounded by cities. The word “town” seems to be quite confusing when we talk about history or archaeology, since a town can mean a city, archaeologically speaking, and is not considered a village or hamlet and sometimes a village is considered to be more than 5000 (my town of 33000 is sometimes called a village even though it is a suburb, or a “city.”)

Just some food for thought. I hope I’ll be true to my word and this is my last comment here before I’m kicked off this computer and Palatia’s.

What I think is funny is that when we talk about urban sustainability, our talk is about density, yet we overlook that part of the equation with suburbs and think only about car-dependence. I don’t think some parts of suburbia are as car-dependent as Kunstler claims, and there are also many cities (like Indianapolis, where people sometimes have 1 to 2 acre lots in some parts of the city) that are sprawled out as well.

My argument was about density, and whether or not you felt suburbs were too dense to support themselves since they are not as dense as cities and much more spread out than cities. People like David Holmgren (see Retrofitting the Suburbs for Sustainability) argue that they are low-dense enough to do so, and that their sprawling and low-dense nature could be their saving grace despite their car-dependence today, since many of those amenites could be put back into neighborhoods that now people rely on cars to get to. Also see from “Raise the Hammer,” this article, Self-Reliant Suburbs.

I am not saying I agree with them. I just think that, with alternative views to Kunstler’s quite narrow arguments of automobile dependence (he does not provide a rebuttal with much evidence with the food production counter-argument), and your own problems you have had with Holmgren’s arguments, I wanted to see if you felt that suburbs could support themselves without a hinterland. Obviously, with your argument of “thorough unsustainability” you are telling me that they cannot be somewhat self-sufficient or support themselves, and are too dense. I’m working on filling in the blanks and seeing how people can say one thing to work on others–my autism makes this a lifelong project.

Of course, since I’m Taylor, you can ban me right now and not respond to this–that’s your choice. If you do so, ban the IP address “Palatia” used in the “Brief Summary of Animism” post, since that was my sock puppet as well. Just like you feel you have to respond to people in order to keep them aware of your opinions on future possibilities, I feel I have to post to your ideas so I can see what you would say on various topics. Of course, due to my autism, I often misunderstand you, and thus fall into nervous breakdowns and blowouts of comments. You can ban me from this IP address and the Palatia address as that is at my grandmother’s house and I’m going to be going there for a few days. I want to make sure I’m banned before I go.

Ya got me, Jason.

I didn’t discuss suburbs because James Howard Kunstler has already discussed the fate of suburbia in far, far greater detail than I ever could. The Geography of Nowhere is a whole, book-length treatment of the subject, or you could see the documentary, The End of Suburbia. Suffice it to say, suburbia is so thoroughly unsustainable that it doesn’t even warrant any further discussion here.