Growing food in the city isn’t just a trendy thing to do. Our very survival depends on it. If there are to be cities in the years to come, they must start pulling more of their own weight where resource production is concerned, and food is one of the most basic of resources.

For the time being, let’s set aside the issue of geophysicist M. King Hubbert’s “Peak Oil” theory that postulates that for a given geographical area, oil production follows a bell-shaped curve, and that after that area reaches peak production, efforts to extract oil are both increasingly expensive and decreasingly fruitful, thereby driving the price of oil to the point that it’s no longer profitable to drill. Some of you who slept through Earth Science in Junior High may think that the Earth is like a giant cherry cordial filled with more petroleum than humanity could ever find a use for, while others—the so-called “abiotic oil” theorists—believe that oil just happens, and that the millions of years’ worth of accumulated organic matter from the Carboniferous Period had nothing to do with it. Or, like many, perhaps you’ve simply never given the issue any thought, and you automatically dismiss any topic that makes you uneasy. To all of you, discussion of fossil fuel depletion sounds like the sort of thing brought up by people in tinfoil hats ranting about alien abductions and secret societies, so you tune out. For now, then, we’ll set aside concerns of fossil fuel depletion, despite it being an even greater certainty in the scientific community than global climate change. Instead, let’s talk about something there’s no denying: the economy.
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