Miles To Go Before I Eat
My backyard garden is giving me mixed results this year. I did okay with the strawberries and snap peas, but the peppers are only so-so and the tomatoes are downright pathetic. Personally, I'm chalking it up to the lousy spring, not my laissez-faire attitude toward vegetables.
Still, I love it. My garden is definitely not saving the world or anything, but there's something weirdly profound about coaxing food from the ground. (Or in my case, coaxing some dicey-looking salad greens from the planter box.) Growing food scratches some peculiar itch we have, whether it's a glimmer of our agrarian past or a sense of self-reliance. It may even be good for us.
While eating locally is probably not the most important environmental decision we make at mealtime it often has important benefits. (More on these below the jump.) But what's local? And can we city dwellers really sustain ourselves locally?
Enter Matt Stevenson -- Sightline's friend, periodic GIS contractor; he's a data-fiend and map-maker. So I wasn't surprised to see that he'd produced this map showing where you can eat on 100 mile diet if you live in Seattle:
This 100-mile diet would be tough. There's some good farmland -- especially in the Skagit and northern Willamette Valleys -- as well as some opportunity for seafood. But there's a lot of dense forest in there; a lot of rock and ice; and a lot of development too.
Sure, fine. But Matt isn't satisfied with general qualitative remarks like these. He crunched the numbers to figure out how much farmland we're protecting near our urban areas -- and whether it could sustain us. The news isn't great.
Cures for Transportation Woes
In Seattle, Mayor Greg Nickels took a cue from Portland and New York by instituting a few “car-free” Sundays where, throughout August, three city streets will be consecutively closed to cars. The program is part of Seattle’s “Give Your Car the Summer Off” project in which the city is encouraging citizens to drive 1,000 fewer miles this year:
"Neighbors will have three to six hours to experience our streets in a new way and to see how livable a city can be when people drive less," Nickels said. "This is our chance to experiment and to evaluate how these events work for people. And we'll be fighting global warming at the same time."
