According to author Richard Heinberg, “One way or another, re-ruralization will be the dominant social trend of the 21st century. Thirty or forty years from now…millions more people than today will be in the countryside…“
At first glance this might seem reassuring to struggling rural communities worn down by decades of out-migration. But the reasons Heinberg gives for making this assertion are enough to give pause to anyone other than an ostrich with its head buried in the sand.
Heinberg foresees four converging problems leading to major shifts in how (and where) Americans eat and live.
The first problem is rising energy costs. Americans enjoy low prices at the gas pump because they are subsidizing the petroleum industry through their tax dollars (probably without realizing it). But if they were paying the full cost at the pump, including the cost of military operations to safeguard overseas oil supplies and the environmental and health costs of using fossil fuels, a gallon of gas would cost an estimated $15 per gallon.
Energy isn’t as cheap as we think it is, and is only going to get more expensive. While there is still much oil in the ground, it’s becoming more difficult and more expensive to extract it. At the same time countries like China and India are using more and more energy – China now uses more electricity than the United States.
In America the development of mechanized agriculture has dramatically increased yields while simultaneously reducing labor requirements. Today 3 to 4 million farmers – about 1 percent of our population – feed far more people than the 40% of Americans who were farming in 1900 could ever have imagined. But this has come at a cost – Heinberg refers to industrialized ag as a system that “uses the soil to turn petroleum into food.” It takes 10 calories of fuel to produce 1 calorie of food; the ag sector uses more energy than any other in this country. Heinberg foresees rising energy costs as constituting a double whammy in regard to food costs – not only will it cost more and more to produce food, it will cost more and more to transport it to cities.
Other problems Heinberg sees developing are a depletion of aquifers and snowmelt for irrigation and an increasingly erratic climate as causing decreases in crop yields. And last but not least, with the average age of a farmer today approaching 60 (only 5.8% of today’s farmers are under the age of 35), Heinberg is worried about where the next generation of farmers will come from.
Heinberg believes that rising energy costs will push many older farmers into retirement. Corporations will buy their land and pass rising production (and transportation) costs on to consumers who will already be dealing with higher utility bills and sticker shock at the gas pump.
Worse yet, though, is the impact Heinberg foresees rising energy costs will have on industry. He anticipates many manufacturers going bankrupt, leading to huge rises in unemployment. Heinberg says though unimaginable today, we could be facing food rationing 20 or 30 years from now.
Heinberg predicts a return to less industrialized and more labor-intensive methods of farming, with an average farm size of 3 to 50 acres, as 30 to 50 million people leave cities in pursuit of food.
Heinberg urges both small towns and cities to begin preparing now. Ways to reduce energy costs (including building “green” buildings, as the UNL College of Architecture has been helping Boone County communities move towards) and ways to produce food locally through gardens, greenhouses, small farms, etc, will be vital.
But man does not live by bread alone: Heinberg points out that “we need a revitalization of farming communities and farming culture. A century ago…small towns across this land strove to provide their citizens with lectures, concerts, libraries, and yearly chautauquas. Over the past decades these same towns have seen their best and brightest young people flee first to distant colleges and then to the cities. The folks left behind have done their best to maintain a cultural environment, but in all too many cases that now consists merely of a movie theater and a couple of video rental stores. Farming communities must be interesting, attractive places if we expect people to inhabit them and for children to want to stay there.”
Though not a pleasant dish to dine on, Heinbergs concerns about the future definitely provide “food for thought.”