Thread: Green potatoes
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Old 12-06-2014, 06:55 PM posted to rec.gardens
Leon Fisk Leon Fisk is offline
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Default Green potatoes

On Wed, 11 Jun 2014 17:32:50 -0400
songbird wrote:

Drew Lawson wrote:
...
Accepting wikipedia's numbers for the sake of debate, New York City
(proper) has an area of 304.8 square miles and a population of
8,405,837. According to my calculator, that works out to about
1010 square feet per person. Take out the space used by roads,
walkways, parks and non-flattop buildings. How well do you think
they will eat if they put in a few hours each, but you take away
the farm influx?


why is it valid to say there will be no
farm inflow from the surrounding area?

if it doesn't happen that we can transport
food into large cities then for sure people
will be moving out. there are vast areas of
the surrounds that could be used again for
mixed agriculture. they are fallow in large
part now because most people are happy with
processed packaged chemfoods (derived from
corn, soy, wheat and rice).


And at ~27k/sqmi, NYC doesn't even come close to getting on wikipedia's
list of top sities by population density. Looks like Manila works
out to about 250 sqft/person.

What you say can be done, but it cannot be done for the current
global population.


assuming people stay in place. as you probably
know, when shit hits the fan, people start to
migrate. when the sea levels increase we'll
already have huge movements of people and will be
forced to rebuild large chunks of infrastructure,
wouldn't it be great if we actually built them
with sustainability, efficiency and better land
use policies for people who will walk, garden
and have green spaces?


songbird


Using wiki as the source...

Total world land mass is estimated to be 57,505,693.767 sq mi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land

and the total world population is estimated at 7.169 billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

So using some math, correctly I hope:

57505693.767 / 7169000000 = 0.00802143866187752825 sq miles

0.0080214 sq miles = 5.256939 acres per person.

And that is counting all land mass, some which would be hard to inhabit
if at all. It just won't work, too many people...

--
Leon Fisk
Grand Rapids MI/Zone 5b
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