probablyasocialecologist: “The fossil fuel

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probablyasocialecologist:

“The fossil fuel industry would need to surrender about $20 trillion in untapped wealth for the planet to avoid a temperature rise of 2 degrees. According to economists and historians, the “last time in American history that such extraordinarily valuable stranded assets existed was in 1865 and the ‘assets’ took the form of human beings,” he writes. Slaves made up half of the South’s economy and 16 percent of that of the United States, which by today’s standards would total about $10 trillion.”

— Audrea Lim, The Ideology of Fossil Fuels
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Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s

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Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s:

radical-agriculture:

“We are being told to eat local and seasonal food, either because other crops have been transported over long distances, or because they are grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. But it wasn’t always like that. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.

These crops were grown surrounded by massive ‘fruit walls,’ which stored the heat from the sun and released it at night, creating a microclimate that could increase the temperature by more than 10°C (18°F). Later, greenhouses built against the fruit walls further improved yields from solar energy alone.

It was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that the greenhouse turned into a fully glazed and artificially heated building where heat is lost almost instantaneously – the complete opposite of the technology it evolved from.“
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