Fundamentals of Resilient Design #10: Local and Regional Food Systems
In this final installment of my ten-part series on the fundamentals of resilient design, I’m taking a look at where our food comes from and how we can achieve more resilient food systems. The average salad in the U.S. is transported roughly 1,400 miles from farm to table, and here in the Northeast, we get a significant portion of our food from farms and processors that are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away. Even in Iowa, where 95% of the land area is in agricultural production, one is hard-pressed to buy locally grown products except on a limited basis, such as at farmers’ markets...
Read MoreResilience and Sustainability in the Food System
Resilience and sustainability are complementary, essential attributes of a healthy food system. One addresses relatively short-term responses to disturbances and the other addresses holistic management for long term stability. There’s no bright line between these two concepts but they aren’t the same. For example, resilience is the ability to bounce back quickly from an extreme weather event by re-establishing food production and distribution, hopefully with improvements so that such events will do less harm in the future, while sustainability is the long term challenge to slow the rate of...
Read MoreFundamentals of Resilient Design #1: Making the Case
I thought a lot about resilience last year, during a six-week sabbatical bike ride through the Southwest. I covered a little over 1,900 miles, most of it over land that hadn’t seen a drop of rain since the previous fall; some of those areas—mostly in Texas—still hadn’t received significant precipitation months after my return home.
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