[Akroncooperative-news] Gliimpses from Isaac Asimov

[Lawrence Parker]

"...In primitive times, individual population centers were virtually self-supporting, living on the produce of neighboring farms.  Nothing but immediate disaster, a flood or a pestilence or crop failure, could harm them.  As the centers grew and technology improved, localized disasters could be overcome by drawing on help from distant centers, but at the cost of making ever larger areas interdependent.  In Medieval times, the open cities, even the largest, could subsist on food stores and on emergency supplies of all sorts for a week at least.  When New York first became a City, it could have lived on itself for a day.  Now it cannot do so for an hour.  A disaster that would have been uncomfortable ten thousand years ago, merely serious a thousand years ago, and acute a hundred years ago would now be surely fatal."

What went wrong?  Read again...

"As the centers grew and technology improved, localized disasters could
be overcome by drawing on help from distant centers, but at the cost of
making ever larger areas interdependent."

And oh so subtly we de-valued the local farmer and shifted from interdependence to nearly full dependence, giving over more and more of our food production to agri-businesses and distant processing centers owned by mazes of corporations.

We spend our hard-earned money bringing in foods to consume and taking out waste products rather than keeping them both local and manageable right here and spending our monies locally.

Food, so to speak, for thought.

Lawrence A. Parker
Managing Director
The Akron Cooperative
234-525-0543
http://www.akroncooperative.com/

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.



      
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