Energy: patterns, planning and architecture

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WASTE BEGETS WASTE

California, as I'm sure you are aware, has now permitted 40% of that state's fertile valleys to be covered by suburbia and the attendant highways that attempt to link work and home. The loss of this agricultural land is felt by all of us daily here in Atlanta.

Which points up another area of enormous national waste in this country: that is, the way in which we distribute our food and produce. Just as America cannot permit itself to become dependent upon foreign oil, neither can Georgia grow to rely too heavily on California's fruits and vegetables. Recent truck strikes dramatically illustrated the folly of placing too much trust on such extended lines of supply.

Dr. Erich Farber, Director of the Solar Energy Research Facility at the University of Florida at Gainesville, recently found that a carrot traveled 6,000 miles before it was consumed in Atlanta and that the milk in some local stores came—refrigerated—all the way from the city of Cincinnati.

Only 20 years ago, the counties surrounding Atlanta were nearly self-sufficient. Today they're covered with suburbanites . . . trusting souls completely dependent upon food and other products produced in distant areas which, in turn, are largely organized under the same stress pattern.

So many states have now moved toward the production of one or only a few crops that a fairly localized soil failure or spell of inclement weather or attack of devastating insects could cripple the nation. This situation cannot long endure and states—even counties—should immediately begin to switch back to a more balanced production of food. As our sources of fuel dry up, today's wasteful transportation and distribution of the things we eat will become prohibitively expensive.

NOT ONE CRISIS, BUT MANY

It is obvious—as even this short discussion of the problem is beginning to illustrate—that the so-called energy "crisis" is not a separate, isolated or one-time phenomenon.

The very lifeblood of our society has always been a seemingly endless supply of low-cost energy and other natural resources. Now (despite repeated warnings over a long period from numerous environmentalists, conservationists, analysts, etc.) we "suddenly" are finding ourselves near the bottom of the richest and most easily tapped sections of our stockpile. At the very time our energy sources are drying up, in other words, we need moreand more energy to mine less accessible minerals, farm increasingly marginal land, produce more potent fertilizer, operate our continually sprawling cities, transport raw materials and finished goods over greater distances, clean up the pollution that this increasingly intensive activity produces, and so on.

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