The Editor
The San Jose Mercury News
San Jose, CA
letters@mercurynews.com and Ms. Carolyn Jung, reporter, at cjung@mercurynews.com
To the Editor:
Your recent front page story, "A shrinking crop of young farmers," (The Mercury News, July 13) was naive in one important area. It ignores the looming problem of our completely running out of oil in the next several decades. Without gasoline, there will be no viable truck food delivery system, so we will either be starving or growing our own food locally. In the next several decades, most of us, like our distant ancestors, will be farmers or at the very least, we will be growing our own vegetables in small city and suburban garden plots.
In Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet system in the late 1980s had very severe impacts. The Cubans lost their Soviet-subsidized sugar export market and simultaneously they lost subsidized cheap fuel, fertilizer and pesticides imported from eastern Europe and Russia. The Cubans were faced with imminent starvation, so they transformed their industrial agricultural export-oriented large farm system into small family-run organic farms. Private organic produce gardens were created in every town and city. Even roof top space was mobilized to produce local food for local people. Now Cuba is basically just one large organic garden.
The good news is that by 2040 A.D. global warming will just be a bad memory, because we will have burned up virtually all of the oil. The bad news is that by 2040 A.D., we will have burned up virtually all of the oil. Search the web for terms, "peak oil" and "cuban organic agriculture" to learn about our near-future without petroleum, gasoline, cars, SUVS, plastics, and truck transport of food.
Yours truly,
James K. Sayre
13 July 2005
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