Random Access

Bill Rees was about 10 years old, on the summer porch of his grandfather’s farm, having supper with his family and a gaggle of cousins when his life’s work suddenly became clear.
“I was just sitting there, staring idly into space when it hit me like a ton of bricks: everything that was on the plate before me not only came from the farm, but by our own. It was an epiphany,” Rees said as he stood yesterday at Wilson Pond in front the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) campus where he would later deliver the keynote address for Environment Week.
“It was like the floor had fallen right out from under me and I was sucked down. We are what we eat and how we acquire it. It became almost an obsession with me to understand the human connection to the earth, in many other ways as well,” said the University of British Columbia professor, who did his undergraduate and Ph.D studies at U of T.
When he was in university, he could not study the human population ecology that fascinated him because, as the old joke goes, it hadn’t been invented yet. So he studied bird population ecology and then went into planning and carved out his own field.
Now, of course, the idea of the ecological footprint – the total amount of land and water required to support a particular human endeavour — the concept Rees envisioned, is ubiquitous.
In his “plausibly provocative” Snider lecture last night to a far-too-small audience in the Kaneff Centre, the 63-year-old professor made a compelling case that cities are unsustainable in their present number and constitution. “The world is in a state of overshoot,” he said. “Consumption exceeds our long-term capacity to keep producing” at this rate.
The earth is like a ship, Rees said in a particularly effective metaphor, “and we can overload it.” Then he reminded us that the first-class accommodations on the Titanic got wet just as fast as steerage, an obvious reference to the extravagant lifestyles of North Americans and Europeans compared to the rest of the world. Having already decimated much of our own forests and agricultural land, we now export fossil fuel exploitation to China and Third World countries.
“We are eroding the fundamental capital of our own existence,” Rees said.
Although media reporting on the Canadian census recently trumpeted the fact that 80 per cent of us now live in cities, we are more reliant than ever on food sources and energy sources outside of them.
Industrial farming means we crowd huge numbers of animals into one area, import fodder for them from lands which we pump full of artificial fertilizers and treat the real fertilizer, the waste of the farm animals, as a waste product. “This is not the work of an intelligent species,” Rees said in a comment that he applied to any number of our current practices.
The bottom line is that we (and that’s the big WE, everyone in the world) must reduce our eco footprint by 80 per cent, the UBC prof estimates.
The good news is that it can be done, says Rees, if we recognize the problem, understand that farmland now deemed worthless today near big cities may be worth 10-50 times more than land for housing in 50 years — and move back toward that old concept of self-reliance. California, which supplies 75 per cent of North America’s table vegetables, has already issued a report warning that its future crops may be jeopardized by irrigation shortages.
Rees recommended good old-fashioned City-states as a potential solution, a throwback of 100-150 years, to the days when an urban centre was supported by the surrounding countryside that fed its needs, literally, because food had to be only a day away from market or it wouldn’t keep.
Back to the days when everything on your plate could have come from your own farm or at least a farm not very far away. Back to a day when conspicuous consumption wasn’t an international competitive sport and when, ironically, enough, studies indicate people were happier with their own lives.
Back, one can only hope, to a sustainable future.