LANDSCAPING IS DYNAMIC WORK, so we thought it would be good to have some original dynamic media up online, so that you could have a better sense of what we do when you go off to work in the morning and leave us alone in your yard all day long. To get twenty skids of heavy stones into a backyard in east downtown Toronto that had only two and a half feet of clearance from their next door neighbours, we used three conveyor belts end to end and moved the materials down the slope assembly-line style. John, Travis & Bob star is this 2-minute clip shot on Golfview Avenue a couple of weeks ago.
TODAY MARKS EXACTLY three months since I returned to work at Green Apple, after an absence of a number of years of globetrotting, doing eco-research and development in the field. So if I make it to the end of the day, then I guess that means that Peter has been pleased with my performance thus far, and that he’s willing to having me stick around for a little while longer. Well, if I’m going to be hanging around for the foreseeable future, then I think I’ve earned the right to start establishing a few new traditions at Green Apple. For example, from now on, let’s end off every month’s worth of blogs with a blast from the past, a story or photograph from the Green Apple archives.
THERE IS AN ELEPHANT in the room, and its name is Population. Whenever we start to discuss the global food crisis and its possible solutions, there is always a staunch unwillingness to look into the abyss at the population issue and its inevitable implications. After drafting plans for the Toronto Skyfarm, featured in the last Green Apple Pie blog entry Grasping at Grass, local architect Gordon Graff justified the high-tech hyper-densification of our agriculture by stating that “unless we want to start talking about human population control — which is politically impossible, in a democracy — we have to start considering new strategies… There’s either going to be massive famine, or we’ll have to condense our agricultural practice… Human beings have never shown the capacity to consume less… The simple fact is that, somehow, we have to find a way to produce more.”
THE PROBLEM IS Malthus remixed: the population of the planet is expanding exponentially, but forty per cent of the planet’s land mass is already being used for agriculture. There are hardly any virgin patches left in the temperate zones to convert into new farmland, and what’s currently being used to grow food is expected to fail in the decades to come. These are the facts and figures for so-called conventional agriculture, using poisonous pesticides. If we demanded that everyone have the right to eat organic food — currently less than three per cent of the population does — we would need to more than double the amount of land being cultivated for food crops. It would mean the total destruction of all of the tropical rainforests, since they would need to be used for grazing, to produce poop for natural fertilizer. So how do we provide the whole human family with healthy food?
