Rob Hopkins at the Positive Energy Conference part 1

[zoroastra999]

Exactly! Can we feed 60 million Brits on home grown organic food? No - there just isn't enough living soil! Even if we could, how many shopaholics would willing turn to the plough? Few - even if they were starving to death!

'Transition towns' probably have more SUV dealerships than organic growers - and those growers would struggle to keep a single family from starvation.

If we are all about to go down the gurgler let's just accept it rather than invent half-baked egotistical fantasies

[FindhornFoundation]

See below for the full reply.

"let's just accept it". Seriously? That's kind of sad.

[TheBigFA]

The most sustainable thing you can do is buy some land, build a house and grow some food? What nonsense is that? Like we need more lifestyle blocks mucking up the landscape! You have to be able to be sustainable where you are!

[FindhornFoundation]

So for my reply I went to Jonathan Dawson, president of the Global Ecovillage Network, basically because he knows so much more than me about all this stuff. He said:

I agree with you that the UK is too small for us all to become small farmers again. This just aint going to happen. However, it is more or less certain that we will return to growing far more of our own food again.

[FindhornFoundation]

Some of that will happen in small-scale backyards and allotments, much of it on small organic farms producing for local markets in a significantly more labour-intensive manner than at present.

Somewhere between 25% and 30% of the population of Europe was engaged in food production (not necessarily all on a full-time basis) before the advent of fossil fuels. So, 20 million farm-workers in Britain some distance before the end of the current century? That is how it looks to me.

[zoroastra999]

It would seem like you are expecting the population to remain at 60 million or so for the next century. How much time do we have? The soil is almost completely destroyed and the present generation of young people is not only lazy, useless and spoilt, they know nothing about food whatsoever - let alone how to grow it. Furthermore they won't have any incentive to learn until they are starving.

I'm not being negative. Unless we stop fooling ourselves about the size of the problem we're screwed!