"If the folks who lived along this highway put in gardens to make up for the escalating inadequacies of an industrial farming system starved for fossil fuel “inputs,” would they be able to feed themselves? Did any vernacular knowledge survive in a populace conditioned to think that food came from the supermarket? Did they know anything about cabbage loopers, powdery mildew, or anthracnose? Would they be able to prevent catastrophic crop loss? How would they defend their crops against deer, rabbits, [and] woodchucks? Would any of them know how to build a garden wall or even a fence? Where would they get fencing material? Would they have to sit out among the potato hills and the bean rows at night with loaded shotguns? And what would they do for light when they heard something munching out there? Would they know how to keep chicken, sheep, [and] cattle, including breeding and birthing them?"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 7, p. 237.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
The Long Emergency
95 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by The Long Emergency →
Related Quotes
"Above all, and most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that re…"
"What is... not comprehended about this predicament is that the developed world will begin to suffer long before the o…"
"It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was ro…"
"Malthus… has been the whipping boy of idealists and techno-optimists for two hundred years. His famous essay proposed…"
"Malthus was certainly correct [that demand will outstrip supply], but cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like coal,…"
"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the…"
"The high tide of the... [industrial] age also happened to be a moment in history when human ingenuity gained an upper…"
"At the same time, the world is overdue for an extreme influenza epidemic. The last major outbreak was the 1918 Spanis…"
"The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, [...] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to …"
"It has been... hard... to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life…"