Reality check

I heard on the radio a couple of days ago - while listening to a programme about sustainable food, the impact of supermarkets on health, and that kind of thing - a startling statistic.

That cities take up 2% of the Earth's habitable surface, but their inhabitants are responsible for using up 75% of the world's annual resources.

It wasn't so long ago - a couple of hundred years or so - that cities didn't exist. The Industrial Revolution began the lemming-like rush of populations into urban environments and it's really only in this century that urban populations have exceeded rural ones. But the city as it was envisaged in the late 18th century is no longer a sustainable model. A city the size of London - with ~10 million inhabitants - masticates its way through 30 million meals a day and the vast majority of those millions of people neither know nor care where the food comes from.

As if we didn't have enough to worry about, we now need to work out what "city life" or "country life" will look like in 100 years' time. "Unrecognisable" is probably the answer.