To compare a block of very diverse soil in a warm the year around tropical setting with a continental corn field won't tell the whole story. Perhaps a better test would be a block of earth from a good garden like kimmsr's.

Kimmsr: Great article. Thank you.

Of course, that layer of tropical cloud-forest in Costa Rica is more diverse by far than that patch of Iowa was 1000 years ago.

But certainly it is true that an Iowa cornfield is a wrecked environment and a sad use of wonderful land. Leave it be for a few decades and the story would be very different.

It does not take decades, only a few years unattended but corporate farms will be problem it the weather is really turning long term.

Its funny to look at the little life in that field and cut out the bigger picture of why we have to farm like that. Is there some new method that provides fields that are full of insect life and still provide enough food? I did not think so.

This post was edited by TheMasterGardener1 on Sun, Dec 16, 12 at 14:30

MG, it isn't at all necessary to have a contiguous 600 or 6000 acres in one crop, so as to feed the world. That happens to facilitate maximum efficiency and thus lowest possible price for the food-processors.

Acre after acre of concrete, grass, flowers and novelty trees. Contiguous sections of city blocks all over the country with grass, flowers and novelty trees while not growing food.
It's silly for people to not grow their own food so the silly response is to grow it for them. I don't like the city block structure of contiguous square mile upon sq. mi.of concrete, grass, flowers and novelty trees and it isn't at all necessary. It is only for the purpose of efficiency and the lowest possible price for public services. :)

(It is only for the purpose of efficiency and the lowest possible price for public services. :)
I would say it is the opposite
highest possible profit for Agra business.

Most people don't use (or think to use) the food sources that are available...I'm not even talking about dandelion greens or other not-in-your-face sources.

We have fig, pecan, and wild raspberry/blackberry plants all over where I live. Very few people tap these resources, even when it's made clear they can. It ends up on the ground as trash or animal/bird food.

Many trees/shrubs selected for street plantings are chosen for their growth habit, resistance to heat/pollution stress, low nutrient need, rooting habits if near pavement, and how little "mess" they make. They're there for a calming/improvement/visual effect more-so than any other reasons we install plants in urban areas.

I've been in other cities where citrus is planted in parking lots...even in the parking lot of grocery stores...and the ground is littered with dropped/ripe fruit waiting for a cleaning crew to bag and toss it.

When you're planning public space, how the public actually uses it guides what's going on. One of the most mind-blowingly simple, yet genius things I've seen with how a local university does public planning of walkways is leaving a huge span of green space without walkways and letting the students, themselves, beat a path through the grass showing the designers where they should lay paths rather than defining it for the public. It's so simple, yet so effective.

I agree that cities are unnecessary as well.

Well let's see, the U.S has 2.3 billion acres of land with 2.6% of that in the Urban category, why then rag on well landscaped non-farm areas crammed with people. All those trees do fantastic things for the air and create habit for animals among other things.

pn: come on, "all cities"?

My main problem with dense urban areas is that the density makes recovery of human effluent to agriculture very difficult as a practical matter, and I believe that loop has to be closed in the relatively near future. We can't continue moving vast amounts of nutrients off the land and across great distances to cities and then ultimately losing those nutrients to the ocean or some non-ag function.

I understand that huge cities are very efficient on the supply side, at least in our existing fossil-fuel paradigm.

How much organic mass is removed each year in the form of smoke and spread across the mountain ranges, miscellaneous land masses and also in the oceans? Each and every year wildfires remove more useful material from our continent than picking corn and sending it into the cities.
Those scorched earth surfaces erode like crazy once the timber is burned off. This is a fixable problem, but we haven't the wisdom as a people to preserve the soils in these forests.
I think it would be useful to 'close this loop' as well. :)

"This is a fixable problem,"

Really? How?

This post was edited by TheMasterGardener1 on Tue, Jan 15, 13 at 15:41

That was a good article, I'm going to school for Environmental Science. I really enjoyed this.

The problem of wildfires in the forest mass is to have adequate fire lanes. The is pretty simple, except there are those that believe the Spotted Owl couldn't possibly survive in a forest that has fire lanes. Outlaw timber, Outlaw timber and Outlaw timber are 3 things that allow forest fires to consume millions of acres of trees, year after year.
Like I said, we haven't the Wisdom, to fix the problem. :)