Congratulations, I wish you all the best in the future projects. I read your essay and I am happy that I had the opportunity to see the ideas of a sustainable future.

Congratulations! It's a good essay. One small concern/question. Firstly, everything you say on the energy side I agree with completely, well put! My issue is with your suggestions for food. While I totally agree that smaller, decentralised production, closer to urban areas could be beneficial, the idea about having intense, indoor production is worrying. The Ecologist magazine highlighted this week the growing occurance of MRSA caused by 'factory farming' of animals in the Netherlands. Even indoor grown vegetables risk losing important trace nutrients. Would outdoor organic gardens in urban areas (roof-tops maybe), not be a better, safer solution, and leave the animals away from dense human settlements?! Otherwise, top essay..

Congratulations Jon! You make a very articulate argument for decentralization. I completely agree that decentralized systems are more resilient, diverse and interdependent (3 important qualities in a sustainable system) than the centralized production and distribution methods we have now. I think it's important to combine a move to decentralize with a long term, constraints-based definition of sustainability (see Holmberg et al. 1996 & Ny et al. 2006), to make sure any one initiative is not worse than what we have now. This decentralization is one of the biggest lessons we learn from the microcosm of Cuba's Food & Energy crisis in the 1990s.