Interesting green factoids..

[The Natural Philosopher]

I read somewhere that it takes a shade over an acre per person to grow enough food and fuel to be relatively self sufficient.

The total land area of the UK is 59M acres more or less.

The total population is IIRC about 60M.

At least 30% of the land is covered either not suitable for anything much - moorland, mountainous etc, or is covered in cities.

It would seem that the answer to a sustainable economy is to nuke Milton Keynes, Manchester, Cambridge, London..and thereby reduce the population and increase the available land area for cultivation.

As well as achieving partial unilateral disarmament.

Seems like a no brainer to me..what does the panel think?

[Tim S]

Fascinating - is that organic farming or intensive farming methods? Does fuel mean trees or bio-diesel?

The green bits of the mountains will support sheep upto a point.

One or two of those would be tempting - but I'm not sure I fancy lanthanides flavoured food products for the next x years!

Cheers

Tim

[Ian Stirling]

And indeed on it, for low mountains.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think its pretty much food and fuel And fairly organic production.

Try flying over that large lump at the top..called Scotland. MOST of scotland is unsuitable for anything but forest and deer, and grouse.

SOME of it isn't sutable for anything at all, except a little bit of peat cutting,

Probably no worse than cyclamates!

[meow2222]

There are so many variables, so many options, and often so many assumptions that it doesnt tell us much without more detail.

Fwiw the cyclamate story is a famous example of political nonsense.

NT

[terry]

. I knew the place was overpopulated and moved out 50 years ago. Better solution surely would be to gradually move some 70%+ of the UK population elsewhere. There ARE less crowded places to live. During some occasional brief revisits it has seemed odd to hear of shortages of UK land for reasonable size economical housing and living allowing the construction of separated homes, on, say quarter to half acre lots, when hundreds of acres were virtually fallow and idle in the large estates; some of which go back to Norman times? I recall UK city 'digs' where people lived in few square feet. (Four or five persons in a two storey 500-600 square foot house. Some houses were only fifteen or even twelve feet wide! All joined together; each with a seven foot high walled bricked in back yard of less than four square metres. Even in villages one would see rows of 'attached' living units (one could hardly call them houses) where the rent payers often didn't even have a garden to grow a few veggies.

[Matty F]

If you have your own coal mine or a small nuclear reactor, you won't need as much space as needed to grow fuel. With all that power you could have multistory greenhouses and put wind turbines on top. Feed the CO2 from the coal burner into the greenhouses as fertiliser.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is what people want, because its cheap.

They don't want gardens, they want flats really.. but they want privacy as well and they want it cheap..but they don;t want to be isolated either.

The compromise is to take a field on the edge of a town, sell it to a developer, who pays for the roads, drainage, electricity water and gas to be run in, puts up some cardboard boxes on the cheap, and sells them as 'affordable accomodation', this ticking the politically correct and the marketing boxes.

No one WANTS to live in an acre on lord Hahas estate, because its 15 miles to the nearest Tesco, 30 miles to the nearest make believe state sponsored job, and they can't afford the tax on the 4WD vehicle they would need to get in and out, or the £100,000 extra they would have to pay to have the mains water, electricity and drainage that they simply can't do without.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Can't mine much uranium here, and the coal would run out eventually.