Planning the Next Great Migration

The population of the broader Philadelphia metro area in southeastern Pennsylvania is over 6 million people, close to half of the state’s population, and that of the Pittsburgh metro area in the west is well over 2 million. Though not on the coast (being up the Delaware River a ways from Delaware Bay), Philadelphia is as much part of the east coast megalopolis as New Jersey to the east, and as such, is likely to be unsustainable. Kurtz et al. (2020) estimate that most urban parts of Pennsylvania would require moderately large foodsheds, over 250 or even 500 km radius, to be supplied even if they adopted a low-meat diet. These include not only the big metros but pretty much the whole eastern end of the state (Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton), as well as Erie in the northwest, and the central counties including the really quite small communities of State College and Williamsport.

Kurtz et al.’s analyses might be pessimistic because they do rely on current land use and production figures, and agricultural productivity in Pennsylvania has certainly not been maximized. The Center for Rural Pennsylvania reported in 2014 that between 2007 and 2012, most counties had decreases, sometimes of 20% or more, in the number of farms and acres farmed. In an era of temporarily high farm productivity and low commodity prices, many farmers who could have produced valuable food get forced out of the business for economic reasons—another sad failure of the great god Market. If importation of food became difficult, though some of the farmland that’s been lost will have gone under pavement or been ruined by fracking, many of those farms could be restored. I therefore do think that residence in the smaller metro areas of this state is a reasonable choice.