NOLaBookish aka blue-collared mind > NOLaBookish's Quotes

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.”
― Jane Jacobs

“Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food

“Obviously, if you don’t love life, you can’t enjoy an oyster.”
― Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer

“The closer to the city, the higher the price of land. A farm that’s worth $2,000 an acre for growing food or raising cattle can be worth 20 times that (it goes up with each zoning upgrade) when it’s subdivided. A developer can make more money from turning an acre of farmland into housing than a farmer could make from a lifetime of selling produce off that acre. Combine this financial bonanza with dwindling incomes for aging farmers, and the pressure to get rid of near-urban farmlands is firmly in place.”
― Peter Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities

“contrast, people living right on the edge of farmland are understandably eager to see the end of farming that is noisy, smelly and messy, even if it’s all an essential part of a farmer’s livelihood — and even if the farm was there long before their subdivisions were. But deep in the public gut is a feeling that farmland is a community resource, not just a commodity, and one day we all might have to depend on our own local farms to supply a lot more of our food. Fields used for export crops and animals today are our insurance against food insecurity tomorrow. It’s a primal, practical instinct to protect ourselves against food shortages, however disconnected that might be from the reality of what’s being produced on farms on the edges of our cities. That might be horses, Christmas trees, ornamental shrubs, flowers, or produce and livestock for export — all completely unrelated to what we are eating today, but grown on land that could feed us tomorrow if we really needed it.”
― Peter Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities

“The only way for a company, co-op or institution to buy farmland in Denmark is by getting permission for uses such as agricultural research. Otherwise, a purchaser has to have farming as a main occupation and move onto the land within six months of buying it. This has”
― Peter Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities

“support added density. In spite of those challenges, TDR zoning can work. For example, in Montgomery County, adjacent to Washington D.C., TDR zoning has protected 40,000 acres in 20 years, achieving half the area’s farmland preservation”
― Peter Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities

“support added density. In spite of those challenges, TDR zoning can work. For example, in Montgomery County, adjacent to Washington D.C., TDR zoning has protected 40,000 acres in 20 years, achieving half the area’s farmland preservation goal without any public spending. Serenbe, Georgia, a master-planned farm community in the newly created city of Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia, on the edge of Atlanta, is a model for the successful integration of farming and development. It used TDRs to protect existing farms and the farming way of life by letting a conservancy organization oversee the purchase of development rights.”
― Peter Ladner, The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities

“Cyclists thus found their hobby not as pleasant as it could be, to say the least, and the League of American Wheelmen committed to doing something about it. A year after Fisher opened his store, the league launched a magazine, Good Roads, that became an influential mouthpiece for road improvement. Its articles were widely reprinted, which attracted members who didn’t even own bikes; at the group’s peak, Fisher and more than 102,000 others were on the rolls, and the Good Roads Movement was too big for politicians to ignore. Yes, the demand for roads was pedal-powered, and a national cause even before the first practical American car rolled out of a Chicopee, Massachusetts, shop in 1893. A few months ahead of the Duryea Motor Wagon’s debut, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to “make inquiry regarding public roads” and to investigate how they might be improved.”
― Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

“Prominent magazine editor and opinion shaper Albert Shaw noted that bad roads “are so disastrously expensive that only a very rich country, like the United States, can afford them.”
― Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

“office inaugurated Rural Free Delivery in 1896, which promised home mail service on roads passable enough to permit it—a mighty popular idea among rural farmers, who until then had viewed good roads and the taxes they required as schemes favoring big-city dandies on their bikes.”
― Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

“reveal activists’ largely forgotten strategy of establishing their own independent businesses to advance the work of their movements and to counter corporate power in the 1960s and 1970s. Contrary to popular opinion, Americans involved with social movements and counterculture did not reject business altogether, even as they sorted through its contradictions. In fact, they exercised more control of their businesses’ commercial possibilities than scholars have previously recognized.”
― Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs

“Environmental justice activists are traditionally concerned with the disproportionate burden of environmental toxins borne by low-income people and people of color. The West Oakland Farmers Market is in some ways the inverse of this. It is concerned with providing access to environmental benefits — healthy food and public space — through the creation of a local food system.”
― Alison Hope Alkon, Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy