I didn't mean to imply that just because I live in a city I wouldn't want to grow food. I have done a lot of that in the city. It just so happens that I now live in a particularly nasty area on the railroad tracks and every time the trains go by (once every 15 minutes it seems) a huge cloud of greasy and probably toxic dust drifts over everything in our front lot. I try not to think aobut the fact that I breathe it. We compost our kitchen scraps mostly to keep them out of the landfill, and will probably plant some decorative stuff with the result.
The other lovely things in my immediate neighborhood are the city dump, the freeway, and (also right across the tracks) a compound of old Industrial Revolution-style heavy industries- metal forges making mining equipment mostly. All of this stuff is within three blocks of my house, and it's an area famous for worst air quality in Berkeley. For those who think that I'm nuts for living here (you're right) there's also a day care on the next block over and there's also the little extra nugget of that the city built a huge soccer field right across the tracks from the dump, so kids come to practice sports daily right in the middle of that air pollution. anyway this is an extreme pollution situation- I know that people sometimes assume that the city is too polluted to grow food, but it is not the case in general. And as Keith says there have been lots of studies on proper composting helping ameliorate pollution. When I lived in downtown Oakland a couple of years ago (at a house called the Church of Everlasting Freeway Noise, this time we lived directly across the street from the freeway, I seem to have kind of a problem with finding clean air in this otherwise very clean and green East Bay), we grew a bunch of food and were concerned with pollution, both from the freeway and from the soil at our house. We decided that certain plants were slightly safer than others in this situation- my permaculture guru roommate and others say that plants don't take up toxins into their fruit as much as their roots of leaves- so we grew tomatoes for instance. I don't know how much this protected us from airborne pollution but it should have kept us slightly safer from anything in the soil. I also completely rebuilt the soil, hauling in compost from elsewhere, and tried to do container gardening as much as possible, using clean soil. mark At 03:06 AM 1/27/2003 +0900, you wrote: > >Mark - very interesting side issue - urban and peri urban agriculture. > >Should food be grown in cities with high levels of air pollution that > >precipitates onto the plants....or perhaps we should think also in > >terms of growing fuel instead (mustard, sunflowers, etc.) in these > >urban and periurban spaces, and grow th food where the air is already > >cleaner. Over time, the urban area itself could perhaps grown more > >renewable oil fuel, use the presscake as fertilizer, clean up sites > >with mustard (phytoremediation), use mustard presscake pellets as > >natural pesticide...and use the biofuels to also burn in the diesels of > >course, cleaning up the air. Sorry about the run on sentence! > > > >Ed > >T [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
