Agritecture: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

To the extent that we think of Thanksgiving in any historical context at all, we paint it in pastoral colors—a festival celebrating the successful harvest of sufficient crops to bring us through another winter. How quaint. Nowadays our major concern about food at this time of year is whether the mobs at the grocery stores will have bought up all the sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. Yet concerns of a more primal nature may lurk just around the corner. If our economy continues to deteriorate, we may rediscover that food is the most vital of life’s necessities. And how, I have long asked, can economic trends of the latter twentieth century possibly be sustained? The shift from farm to city proceeded apace after World War Two, as industrialization rendered farm hands obsolete while creating more jobs for factory workers. Then various high-tech industries shifted gears, and factories themselves became largely push-button affairs. Workers were “re-educated” as computer technicians and white-collar market analysts. The standard of living, so the myth goes, powered its way upward at hyperbolic rates.

Trouble is, the myth is just a myth. There are not and can never be enough white-collar jobs to soak up all the unemployed manual laborers released by increasing digitalization and/or robotic supplementation. The whole point of advanced technology is that it does more work quicker and cheaper. Only a fool could suppose upon reflection that the number of jobs would remain stable—but in a higher income bracket—as technology works its magic of cutting current jobs and shrinking future costs.

Even the rosiest of scenarios, then (and the one which best suits autumn ’08 is tinted more like an old mushroom), would prophesy a future full of pink slips. What will millions of us do when we can’t work, or when our three part-time jobs sweeping out trash and cleaning toilets—taken all together—cannot feed our family? I have been urging for over a year now the creation of a new science dedicated to finding ways of growing nutritious and abundant food quickly and abundantly on something the size of the average suburban lot. The lot’s back yard need not be considered the only arable terrain, either. What about the roof space of a 2,000-square-foot residence (which usually includes the additional square footage of a garage)? Why not glass it in with hail-resistant sheets and turn the whole thing into a greenhouse? What about indoors—what about, say, a large fish tank where table scraps could be disposed of? What species of edible fish would grow fast enough in such an environment to put one of them on the table every other week? Nut trees in back yards could coexist with gardens—could even protect certain crops from the summer sun so devastating in my part of the country. As for milk-producing livestock, the main argument against such “pets” has always been the unsanitary conditions they create; yet it seems to me that they could both manure many a hungry suburban half-acre and keep that acre cropped without the aid of noisy, highly polluting mowers. (The typical gas mower throws exponentially more pollutants into the air per gallon than the typical automobile.) Proper sanitation is the order of problem that a small dose of high-tech should be able to solve readily.

Why are we not discussing these ideas as a culture? Where is the interest in them among Obama’s “change agents”, whose brightest ideas seem to stall around the legislation of more trenchant anti-pollution standards and “infrastructure” projects very similar to the “roads to nowhere” which the British fashioned for starving Irish chain gangs more than a century ago?

I would dub the new science “agritecture”, because its very essence would be the fusion of crop-growing with living spaces. Agritecture would ensure people around the world the level of freedom which we Americans claim to hold so dear, but which we too often deliver holding a gun in one hand and a job flipping burgers in the other. The citizen who a) owns his property and b) can feed his family mostly or entirely from that property doesn’t need a damn thing from anybody on any given day… except to be left alone. He may drive into the city and design sewers or sell luxury airships if he wishes, and he will no doubt be fabulously rewarded for his initiative. If worse comes to worst, however—if it turns out that not enough twenty-first century Earthlings can afford a private flying saucer—he will always be able to survive, and to secure his family’s survival, with his own hands. Or he may choose to live more humbly from the outset, composing mandolin concertos when not tilling his garden, and his soul (if not music-loving posterity) will give him thanks. In either case, he will be free, truly free: not free because of a bail-out or an entitlement or a social safety net, but because he has operative hands and feet and a will to live.

So on this Thanksgiving, I say a prayer for agritecture, that it may soon be born.