Sprawl

We are consumers. On the surface that is fine. We need food, water, clothing, shelter and many other useful and practical items. These need to be manufactured, so we consume resources to do so. We take things to make things.

The problems begin when we take more than we return. We have become a society of shoppers and this societal obsession with shopping concerns me. Our passion for shopping and other forms of consumption may well be the death of us all. This week I'll begin a look at how urban development has impacted our food supply system.

We'll begin with the strip mall. Strip malls are associated with suburban living, cars and urban sprawl. We need to ask ourselves what we are losing each time we lay down the asphalt and concrete in order to build another clone strip mall. As cities expand, they grow outward gobbling up more land as they progress.

This serves to increase the distance that our food has to travel. As farm land is paved over, the farm is pushed farther away from the people who need its produce. This distancing of people from their food sources has many side effects, not the least of which is the distance that food must travel from the field to your kitchen.

Green space begins to disappear at an alarming rate and much of that green space was either arable farm land or wildlife habitat such as wetlands. The unchecked growth puts tremendous pressure on the other species that once lived in the region and are forced to moved. The loss of diversity that takes place makes our society more vulnearable.

As we pave over farm land we increase the amount of fossil fuels that we use to transport from from field to kitchen. As the distance between producer and consumer increases, the environmental cost also rises.

Once we lose the green space to strip malls, parking lots and big box retailers, it is very difficult to get it back. Each time we transform the environment from lush, green, full of life fields, forests and wetlands to the deadly, dull, black and grey of concrete and asphalt that becomes sidewalks, parking lots and clone stores, we lose something that is precious to our survival and distance ourselves from Nature.

It is our interaction with Nature that brings food to the table. The strength of our food security is directly related to our relationship to this food production process. The farther we are removed from it, the weaker our security is. Urban sprawl is a serious threat and one we need to know more about so that we can develop sustainable alternatives.

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