Urban farming

I see many groups like this trying to make a difference. I only wish the world would tilt in their favor, although I'm not sure we have enough time left.

Here's an example of what one family is doing:

Urban Homestead

Thanks, Green Witch, lovely post. Lovely idea altogether. When the world comes crashing down, many will survive like that.

You're more of an optimist than myself. Sadly, I think we are going to be back to living in caves and throwing rocks at each other. I think the world will crash/burn and look more like "Road Warrior" then "Little House of the Prairie". I sincerely hope I'm wrong. It just this last year I've spent many hours at various environmental conferences and the news is not good. A nice as I think it would be to create an oasis I see life as so interconnected that it's probably not possible.

<sniff> That brought a little mist to my eyes. What a nice idea. I think we have lost something important by our massive movement to the cities of the world.

Long ago I saw this film and I think that all of us North Americans should see it. It might help us to adjust and cut back on the incredible waste and pollution we are guilty of.
............................
This ecological drama, set in 2017, presents a world where pollution has generated ever more unpredictable weather and rendered large chunks of the planet into disaster zones. After a hurricane destroys everything they've built for themselves, Louisiana shrimp fisherman Drew Morgan (Craig T. Nelson) and his family, including wife Suzanne (Bonnie Bedelia), flee through a series of refugee camps to upstate New York, where Drew's estranged former business partner Larry Richter (Jurgen Prochnow) -- who has designs on Suzanne -- lives in comfort and affluence.
.
Along the way, Drew loses his daughter, Linnie (Ashley Jones), to an agrarian doomsday cult; watches his elderly father (Richard Farnsworth) suffer a stroke; and almost drives away his confused oldest son, Paul (Justin Whalin). When Larry offers to shelter Drew's family if Drew himself will leave, Suzanne and the kids rally behind him. Things go awry, however, when an attempt to smuggle themselves across the border ends with Craig washed up on Canadian shores and the rest of the family stranded and penniless back in America.
.
Originally presented as a two-part miniseries, The Fire Next Time premiered on CBS on April 18 and 20, 1993.
.
http://music.msn.com/movies/movie.aspx?m=80395&

We could study the Cubans who were forced to grow their own food.
.
http://www.cityfarmer.org/cuba.html

Americans have grown their own emergency food in the past, with the best example being Victory Gardens during WWII. It was a very successful program. Although it seems within one generation few people now know a tuber from a seed.

The real problem is climate change. If you can't predict the weather you can't grow anything. Our agriculture (large and small) has been developed over thousands of years based on a fairly predictable patterns of weather. That is changing. Long droughts followed by floods, heat waves followed by frosts, etc. make it almost impossible to know what to grow. Two years ago we had 80 degree days in late March and April, in mid-May the night time temperature hit 19 degrees two days in a row. Anything started in the garden was trashed by the frost. This year we had incredibly warm weather in January (low 70;s) and then a ton of rain followed by a very cold, below zero February - most of my garlic crop looks like it rotted. We are destroying our own stability within the natural world. If this trend continues, we will face massive food shortages due to crop failures and growers unable to replenish seed supplies.