Global Warming: Passing The "Tipping Point"

I wonder where Canada will get its food from once the water is such a huge problem in California that they can no longer feed half the world? After all much of our farmland has been developed around our large cities, more has been flooded by hydro damns, and who's to say that we will not be experiencing droughts and storms that will threaten anything we would grow? But where our food comes from and how it is produced has been of small concern for our governments for years. They'll just take our tax dollars and "create" food from toxic waste and label it Monsanto.

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"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

BC has a so called ALR, or Agricultural Land Reserve, protecting all farmland, established by the Barrett NDP govt. in the early '70s and no Socred, or BC Lib, basically Socred/Reform govt. dared to touch it. They nibbled at it and cut large portions from it, like Richmond, but for the most part it is still working. Our land was not in it, when we bought it in 1975, but we petitioned it and now about 2/3 of it is protected as farmland.

Ever since its beginning, economists and their sleazebag "think tanks", like the Fraser Institute, the Reform Party etc. have been propagandizing for the removal of the ALR, as it "makes no economic sense". According to Michael Walker of the Fraser Inst. we should build on the ALR and import our food from California, as it would be "cheaper and more efficient".

The policy papers of the FI claim that farmland can be built on and when it becomes "economically feasible" the buildings could be torn down and the land returned to farming. I've even read an article in the Vancouver Sun by an Simon Fraser U economics professor suggesting that the "ALR makes no economic sense" because if we need more farmland, all we have to do is clear some forests and turn it into farmland.

So much for the "science of economics" being taught and propagandized by these fleabrains, supported by our taxes.

The most efficient food production is the family farm, as it has been carried on in some parts of the world for thousands of years on the same piece of land, while corporate monoculture destroys the land and makes it dependent on drugs for artificial foods that poison people.

I've been in this racket in corporate farming, in the beginning of the fraudulent Green Revolution, since 1948 and for the past 30 years in organic, so I do have some small understanding of the subject.

Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC.

Ed;

I too have been lamenting the paving of our aerable (sp?) land here in Ontario. Given your background, do you have any links to resources surrounding the topic of sustainable farming, family farms, proper stewardship of the land (in light of food production of all types), etc.?

Norm,

It is easy to find sources these days, just look for books, articles on organic farming and economic systems based on 4 physical laws : The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics and Newton's Laws on Reaction and Speed.

You can find all the answers, or leads, by the millions, by typing your questions into google.

Never mind the academic, highly scientific versions, the highschool levels are good enough to design new, energy, environmentally and economically efficient production systems in agriculture and industry. They would solve the problems of poverty and ecological destruction, but they wouldn't be "business friendly". In other words, sustainable and efficient but with very low profits and deadly on self appointed ruling classes, regardless of the colour of their ideologies.

Try starting with, if you can get a copy of the 60 odd year old book of Louis Bromfield titled "Pleasant Valley". I just checked Google and it has quite a lot of hits on it. That book was an eye opener for us many years ago, when we gave up on farming on account of the terrible damage caused by the chemicals.

Cheers, Ed.

Norm, I posted the following information about the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) on another recent thread already, but just in case you haven't seen it, I thought I would include it here as well as an additional response to your question to Ed about sources of information on sustainable agriculture. <br />
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For anyone interested in keeping informed about the issues surrounding sustainable agriculture, I'd recommend signing up for the free ISIS email newsletter. The newsletter comes out about once a week or so, and it frequently contains encouraging stories from different parts of the world about farmers who are finding success in rejecting high-input, unsustainable, factory farming methods and adapting their home regions' traditional methods and crops to grow healthy, nutritious food for themselves and their communities and doing it all in a fashion that will be sustainable for the long term as well. The sign up link is on the right hand side of the home page at: <a href="http://www.i-sis.org.uk">http://www.i-sis.org.uk</a><br />
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More articles from ISIS on sustainable/organic agriculture are available here:<br />
<a href="http://www.i-sis.org.uk/susag.php">http://www.i-sis.org.uk/susag.php</a>