We Need to Bring Back the Victory Garden

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	• Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture Dale Allen Pfeiffer New Society Publishers, 2006 - 125 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

We Need to Bring Back the Victory Garden

I wish I had read this book last year, I would already have prepared a vegetable garden to plant this spring. I know about Peak Oil, etc. but this book really got my attention. It provides a clear explanation of how dependent our food supply is on fossil fuels. Higher and higher food prices are in store for us, soon. And that's before we start to see food shortages. The agricultural land in the U.S. can only support about 200 million people, and we have almost 300 million. Plus this agriculture is heavily dependent on oil (to run the irrigation pumps, harvest, process and transport the products), and natural gas (to make fertilizer..who knew?). In a politically unstable world of rising fuel prices, not to mention a future without those fuels, do we really want to rely on imported food to feed our nation? Or go to war over food? This book outlines the problems and has an action plan and extensive list of resources to help solve the problems. Yes! There are things you can do to avert this crisis, whether you live in the city, suburbs, or country.
Spade up those (organic) Victory Gardens, folks, and learn how to provide and preserve at least some of your own food. Support your local food producers. This year. You'll be glad you did.

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Even though I believe that this book is on an important subject, I thought that the material was overly brief and only stated what others have said without proof. Seemed really short on background facts and technical reasoning.

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Crisis in Agriculture

I bought this book by Mr. Dale Allen Pfeiffer even after reading his horrible book "The End of the Oil Age." I don't care who this author hates, blames or votes for. I did buy Eating Fossil fuels and I must say that I am glad I did. It's a good work! It's professional. It's well written and in this book the author is not foaming at the mouth political. All liberal democrats leaning to the left just love Cuba and it's redistributing of wealth and the Cuban miracle. The Cubans decided to get up and grow vegetables rather than starving to death. Really, you guys give them too much credit for doing what's necessary to eat. Overall, I liked Mr. Pfeiffer's book. It's well done. Regards, Keith Renick, Peachtree City, Ga.

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Very informative!

One good thing about this book is that the author does not need 300 pages to explain the Oil/Agricuture relation. What I liked most of this book is the explanation on the evolution of agricuture to these days, making clear that Oil is an important contributor to production performance, due to the use of fertilizers, pesticides and of course the energy derived from it in Industrial Agriculture. I agree with the author that we are beginning a transition to a new way of living, not pleasant, due to the fact that oil depletion will make difficult to attain a sustainable agriculture, even a sustainable civilization with the population numbers we have. The effects are visible, inflation and food crisis.
Most people think that technology will remedy the situation, but if you read more about energy you will realize the future's precarious situation. Governments in the world need to put an eye on it and start doing energy projects, particularly Nuclear. India must control its population growth also. I have my opinion on Cuba but considering all this is a very informative book.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. Estimates of the net energy balance of agriculture in the United States show that ten calories of hydrocarbon energy are required to produce one calorie of food. Such an imbalance cannot continue in a world of diminishing hydrocarbon resources.

Eating Fossil Fuels examines the interlinked crises of energy and agriculture and highlights some startling findings:

The worldwide expansion of agriculture has appropriated fully 40 percent of the photosynthetic capability of this planet.
The Green Revolution provided abundant food sources for many, resulting in a population explosion well in excess of the planet's carrying capacity.
Studies suggest that without fossil fuel-based agriculture, the United States could only sustain about two-thirds of its present population. For the planet as a whole, the sustainable number is estimated to be about two billion.

Concluding that the effect of energy depletion will be disastrous without a transition to a sustainable, re-localized agriculture, the book draws on the experiences of North Korea and Cuba to demonstrate stories of failure and success in the transition to non-hydrocarbon-based agriculture. It urges strong grassroots activism for sustainable, localized agriculture and a natural shrinking of the world's population.

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