[scythe]

Having eight feet of steel behind you makes a lot more sense when you get rear-ended by a drunk driver going 45 mph while you're sitting at a red light.

>The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the sun beats down on our cities only to fall on ornamental grass and concrete. Food waste is hauled off to putrefy in landfills. Normal and absurd.

This has more to do with humanity's insistence on living in places which cannot reasonably produce enough food to sustain the local population. The Phoenix metropolitan area, located in an Arizona desert, holds over 4 million people; Moscow, just shy of the Arctic Circle, is home to 11 million.

[eru]

I guess Americans look at distances in a different way than us Europeans, but Moscow isn't `just shy of the Arctic Circle'.

There was also a major heat wave in Moscow last summer. See e.g. "Heat probably killed thousands in Moscow" (http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/08/17/us-russia-heat-deat...).

[scythe]

>I guess Americans look at distances in a different way than us Europeans, but Moscow isn't `just shy of the Arctic Circle'.

You're quite correct (these scaled-out world maps can be misleading), though it is not really situated on fertile ground either. A city where the weather has historically been a major force preventing invasion does not bode well for agriculture!

[bh42222]

A city where the weather has historically been a major force preventing invasion does not bode well for agriculture!

Oh my God, you are wrong on the INTERNET! I must attempt to help you!

There's PLENTY of agriculture on the same latitude as Moscow, in fact there's plenty of agriculture in and around Moscow. There's no oranges or bananas but wheat and potatoes do just fine in the surprisingly long and hot summers. Just because the winter is also long and bitterly cold, does not automatically imply summer must be short and cold.

Climates are not that simple.

[protomyth]

The industrial food system is efficient use of land and keeps those smells city folks don't like far away. There are other advantages that people have looked at other than food to decide where to put a city.