Farmland under attack

…Energy-policy expert Richard Heinberg reported the startup of this campaign in “Threats of Peak Oil to the Global Food Supply,” a paper presented in June, 2005, to a conference in Dublin, entitled “What will we eat when the oil runs out?”

The oil has not yet run out, but it keeps growing more expensive. At the same time, we have become more dependent on food transported longer and longer distances by oil-fuelled trucks – while the population increases and the acreage of farmland shrinks.

The shrinking happens partly because soil is being eroded by water that runs off more rapidly in the absence of sufficient vegetation to hold it back, partly because more and more land is being paved over for roads and buildings.

Randy Hayes, Oakland’s director of sustainability in the mayor’s office, launched the city-farming initiative.

Goldstream News Gazette