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Page added on February 6, 2014
Paving land that feeds us
The News Advertiser’s assertion in an editorial last week that, “There’s no doubt that an airport would be a huge economic benefit …. creating countless jobs” shows breathtaking ignorance of the facts.
The complete lack of information from Ottawa is what last Monday’s council motion was all about. No business case has been made by Ottawa since 1972. And Ottawa’s air-traffic projections have always been wrong. Pickering airport was supposed to be needed in the 1980s, then 2000, then 2012. Now it’s 2027.
Yet Pearson is running at just over half-capacity, and Hamilton and Waterloo are struggling at 3 per cent and 2 per cent capacity.
All these empty or half-empty airports are on Toronto’s more-populated west side. So how could an airport in Pickering be successful or provide “countless” jobs? It’s smoke and mirrors, like the Canada Job Grant program that doesn’t exist but has so far cost taxpayers over $2.5 million in advertising.
The 1972 decision to build Pickering airport was political — to give Toronto what Montreal was getting: a Mirabel. Billions of tax dollars wasted, and how many jobs are there now? None.
The latest Pickering airport announcement was also political — and no gift. The cost of infrastructure — initial and ongoing — would raise our taxes, with no guarantee that this airport would succeed. Unneeded airports fail.
There’s an alternative. Spend the money on transit systems to link cities and existing airports. This would create jobs. Meanwhile, let the “airport lands” produce revenue by feeding the GTA. Agri-business is big business (it’s Durham Region’s top employer) and will only get bigger, creating jobs from farming to retail to research, as secure local food sources become essential to our future.
Wiser countries are desperately buying farmland, including Canada’s, ahead of a looming global food crisis. Another two billion people will be on this planet within 30 years. Climate change and extreme weather are causing desertification in some nations, flooding in others. California’s droughts and Florida’s frosts are driving food prices skywards. And what is Canada doing to ensure food security? Paving the land that feeds us. We should be protecting our prime farmland as if our lives depended on it. Which they do.
Mary Delaney is a founding member of Land Over Landings (2005), and chairwoman since the June 11, 2013 airport re-announcement.
17 Comments on "Paving land that feeds us"
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 1:04 pm
OK, reprint of an earlier analysis posted of the artic article:
Yeap, GregT/NR, us 7BIL will make sure the 9BIL has less water or more toxic soup. Do you guys really think we can hit 9BIL pop and how bad could a die off be? Man, I mean if you look at the four important variables energy/chem, water, soil, and stable climate they are all in decline. Let us just take Gail’s last oil supply graph which I would say fits the collapse many of us see coming. Water stress is now very real on every continent. Just ask Sao Paulo, California, and 17 other extreme risk countries. We see soil loss for multiple reason. Look at China and we see normal Ag erosion, increased development, toxic pollution, desertification, and built out hydo. Multiply that across the globe as typical. Through in unstable climate. Let’s face it we only have civilization now because of stable climate that allowed agriculture. I am hearing John Lennon’s song “Imagine”. Imagine climate never stabilized adequately for agriculture. We still could be a normal stable ecosystem species. OK, I am doing a mental what if looking at the above variables. We can use 2020 collapse time frame. Energy will be down 30% based upon Gail’s graph. UN water numbers indicate 2.5% annum world increase. Let’s say today is the base and we have just enough water averaged across the earth. We get a 15% decline. We can use a decline of 1% a year global average or 6% by 2020 for soil. For climate instability rough numbers based upon rough UN numbers or 3%. Recap 30% energy, 15% water, 6% soil, and 3% adverse climate. I don’t know how to combine these numbers to get an impact figure so let’s average to get 13% adversity index. We need 15% more food by 2020. So there is not enough food to grow to 9BIL to start with. These numbers say we could have a population decline of 13% in 6 years or 900MIL or one in seven. OK, bash me please for being messy but some kind of decline or cap looks inevitable
Makati1 on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 1:55 pm
The US has already paved over some 180,000 square MILES just with highways alone. It is probably more than double that if you count all paved and built on areas. There are about 1,500,000 square miles of farmable land in the US. So we paved over about 1/4 of our food supply. And, we are destroying what is not paved over with poor farming practice. No news here.
Makati1 on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 1:59 pm
Oops! Bad math. about 40,000 sq.mi. of highways but that is still too much….
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 2:55 pm
Makati1 any numbers out of China. Last I heard there are highways to nowhere there.
rollin on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 3:18 pm
Total farmland area in the world is equivalent to the area of South America. Total ranchland area is equivalent to the area of Africa.
I don’t think we are going to make that 9 or ten billion people. We already have much of the planet (and some of the best parts) covered with agriculture.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 3:39 pm
In a future utopia, citizen teams will exercise by swinging sledge hammers and pickaxes to break up vast stretches of parking lots and pavements, then reuse that asphalt and concrete for other more immediate and more beneficial purposes, freeing up prime farmland and grazing pasture for food production at the same time.
Dave Thompson on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 3:49 pm
Global climate change is upon us, enjoy the ride while it lasts.
PrestonSturges on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 3:55 pm
Not only does NYC have some of the best water in the world, losing it would be hundreds of billions of economic damage, and replacing it (if it were possible), would be hundreds of billions more.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 4:29 pm
NR, I wonder what the effects will be to this farm land they uncover from being covered? One problem would be how much of the good topsoil was removed and taken elsewhere? Yet, I am sure in many locations it is still there. Gold under our tires. Salvage our new growth industry.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 4:46 pm
Davy — Now that you mention it, I am absolutely positive that they bring in the bulldozers and scrape the top soil off when preparing the site for concrete or asphalt overlay. Here in Portland, OR metro area, the metro is surrounded by vast expanses of valley farmland — but a LOT of it has been covered up by housing tracts, roads and business parks. I’m sure you’re right — remove the concrete or asphalt, and you’ll probably run into impacted and pressurized clay with gravel/crush rock pressed into the top 12 inches or so. Well, so much for a future utopia of breaking that crap up with sledgehammers and pickaxes — not sure that would be much of a “utopia” anyway (which was the original joke that nobody seems to be getting…sigh).
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 5:12 pm
NR your dark chain gang humor blew past my feeble mind…Ha. Maybe in the future put a warning note before you inject humor…so I can change gears
DC on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 9:17 pm
We see this kind of thing all the time. Industrial civilivations fetish for shuffling people around in the noisiest, most expensive and least efficent manner we can. ‘We’are fixated on building all the wrongs of infastructure. Airport expansions, more roads, more ports(to export resources and import salad shooters). We loving building white elephant mega-projects.
Remember Mirabel Airport in Quebeq? Probably only Greg here knows what I am referring. Another ill-considered mega-dollar white elephant built in the 80s. I actually when through it once when I was young. Same thing, out in middle of nowhere, underutilized. Got converted to a cargo airport. The last passenger flight was in 2003.
We will keep on ‘investing’ in expensive, fossil-fuel projects like these, even while its clear now, we should be investing in projects that have more to do with sustainable jobs. I mean, what if the money had been towards a free-light rail system for these regions instead of jets? What kind of spin-offs would that have created? Farms being seized for cargo jets hauling plastic trash? Yes, that makes perfect sense….
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 9:34 pm
DC, white elephants are probably going to follow the dinosaurs to extinction. Governments everywhere are feeling the pinch. The last round was the massive stimulus following 2008 crisis. I don’t see much more on the horizon.
DC on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 9:57 pm
Your right, but consider, most of the so-called ‘stimulus’ was almost all paper stimulus. Bail-outs for billionaires. Very little of the ‘shovel’ ready variety. Of course, what little shovel-ready was undertaken was how I characterized above. In the US of War and Coal, the only thing ‘stimulated’ were weapons manufacturers and Wall Street no?. Mal-investments. If the last ‘stimulus’ was majority on paper for white-collar criminals, I agree. Well see more paper shuffling and far less, even on white elephants like airports. Either way, well get plenty of what we dont need, and very little of what we actually do.
James A. Hellams on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 10:08 pm
DC you are absolutely correct.
It is all about keeping aviation and highway based transportation going at all costs. Even to the point of destroying the very land we need to sustain our lives.
In the mean time, rail transportation (the most energy efficient and most energy alternative means of transportation we will ever have) is being destroyed.
Rail transportation can carry more people and more freight, more efficiently, and with unlimited sources of energy; and require far less land space than aviation and highway transportation systems.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 11:22 pm
James, the right rail transport. The grandiose high speed kind is a dead end in a contracting world.
DC, I am sticking by the guns that in a very short time the effects of this financial crisis is going to put an end to the stimulus’s and bail outs. We will see a mad scramble by world governments to control mayhem. Wall Street will contract close to 60% or more when you look at the overextension of the economic segment of our global economy. When finding enough food for the population is an issue white collar will not be an answer. In the triage environment of collapse the financial sector will be dead weight that will be the first to go. The jobs will not be there for these folks. The economy will not be able to afford the salaries and bonuses we see today. There will be allot of things falling from the high rise buildings so watch out for falling objects that are dressed in suits. Now, you are correct that all the way up to that magic “Day of Judgment” there will be a continuation of the BAU that dishes pork and privilege to a select few who are connected
DC on Thu, 6th Feb 2014 11:54 pm
No doubt, when people start clambering for rail transport, the pols and the corporations still standing will say, sorry, cant do that. We blew 100 years and hundreds of billions\trillions of dollars on ‘freeways’, bank bailouts, subsidies to oil and auto corporations and airport expansions, cant help ye..sorry cookie jar is empty. Youll have to make due with what you got….