- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
- geography
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
- geography
- hackernews@derp.foo
Lots to unpack in this somewhat ranty article, but also some food for thought.
Lots to unpack in this somewhat ranty article, but also some food for thought.
You talk a lot like an authoritarian for someone in a punk server.
How so? I never implied forcing anyone, but rather that urbanisation is a long term mostly voluntary trend and that there is a need for a cultural shift away from alienating hyper-specialisation of the working age population (again obviously voluntarily, but that’s not going to be very hard either I think).
Is it? I think people experience very heavy economic pressures to move to urban areas, but so many of those available urban jobs are just bullshit jobs that don’t need to exist. Almost 10% (from memory) of American GDP is financial services, for example. It’s true that urban areas are more efficient by many metrics, but some of those metrics are also fundamentally capitalist.
Gonna have to disagree with you here. I live in a very rural community (1500 person town), and this just isn’t how people work. People who grow food still need hospitals, grocery stores, mechanics, schools (including colleges–many farmers have degrees in farming), hardware stores, tractor parts stores, plumbers, and so on, but most importantly, all people need and deserve community.
In my opinion, viewing humans as somehow apart from nature, such that we should pave small areas of the earth and jam us all into them, is a symptom of the greater problem. We are animals. Animals rely on and are a part of nature. We’ve been pretending that we’re not a part of nature for a while now, and that’s been a real fucking mess. To me, that’s the appeal of solarpunk, and how I found this community. Now more than ever, it’s fundamental that we re-imagine the relationship between humans, nature, and technology into one that’s symbiotic, not extractive.
There might be economic pressures, but all in all the pull factors of urbanization seem to dominate. Sure, some of the jobs are bullshit, but people by and large prefer them over farming jobs. Part of that is of course cultural and I think we really need to make agricultural jobs more attractive to young people, but in the end it is up to them to decide, and currently most seem to prefer city life.
As for a symbiotic relationship, sure I absolutely agree! However that symbiosis will have to take a vastly different shape than nostalgic patterns of a largely imagined past that most people would probably hate if really reestablished. And cities are not incompatible with the idea of symbiosis with nature, in fact given the total population we already have, they will likely have to play a central role in it.
I think this deserved a separate reply. First of all how many of these people actually work inside the community as opposed to just live there and drive to work somewhere else (or work remotely)? As least in densely populated Europe that is the majority of the people living in these small towns.
Furthermore, most if not all the examples you mentioned do not require them to be present in that small town and in fact rarely they are. They are usually only available in the nearest bigger city. This can be inconvenient at times for these villagers, but it is much more efficient and its is rather the transport of those goods and people that should be improved, so that those city services become easily available to the people that need them.
Wait, so on what scale of population do we peasants deserve a hospital and a college then? I’m really not sure I like this. Cities are fine for the folk who like them, but forcing all humans to live in them (even just in your mind) is inhumane. Some people want to live in cities, some people want to live in rural areas.
Right now, there are a series of insufferable folk who live in rural areas and do remote work. And small scale farming. And worse, ponies. Will I be re-urbanized in your utopia? How would you try to sell that to me? Am I supposed to like my new utopian city bullshit job? I have a remote one already and I don’t like it, I wish it didn’t exist, and that the poor PMs sending it to me from New York or Hong Kong could dedicate themselves to gardening or working in a (digital or physical) commons library and playing with their kids instead, thank you very much.
No need to become defensive 😅
Obviously everyone deserves these things, but you can’t expect them to exist in a 1500 inhabitant village. These kind of services have a natural catchment area and have always been located in cities to be closest the the highest number of people utilizing them.
As for your remote work in a rural area… Sure that’s relatively nice now, and definitely better than commuting hours each day by car to some BS job, but try to take an honest assessment just how unsustainable and dependent on individualized car infrastructure such a luxury lifestyle is (sorry trolling a bit on that part 😜). If you were actually working in a field like agriculture… sure no way around it, but your BS remote job doesn’t have to be in a rural area.
It might make individual sense right now due to low energy prices and comparatively much cheaper housing, but in reality you are externalizing a lot of environmental costs, which you would not as a city inhabitant living in an energy efficient apartment complex with services in walking distance and nearby public transport.
Puh, others have said most already with less words and I’m getting too frustrated here. You don’t seem to be aware of how the rural landscape with all its functions feeds the city, and the many functions people have in this landscape, and the change the rural landscape is undergoing with internet being a thing and people not having to live at their place of work.
Nobody here wants that everybody lives in small scale farms, that is an intellectual debate between Mr. Monbiot and Mr.Smaje which I consider quite silly because urban/rural is a yes-and matter, not a ‘people should’ matter.
Hmm, I think this is rather a communication problem, because I think I am very much aware, having grown up on a farm, worked for nearly a decade in something akin to agricultural extension services (but not exactly that) and are currently living in a 1500 inhabitant village.
But I am also painfully aware of just how unsustainable this kind of livestyle is, and honestly think that if you do not have a very good reason to be in that exact place (which I am slowly working towards personally), then it is worth considering for oneself if you are rather part of the problem and not part of the solution.
And looking around, I see very little awareness of this with rural inhabitants, who for the vast majority do not actually have a very rural lifestyle (except in regards to much higher than average resource use) and are at most indirectly involved in primary production.
Maybe you are living in the wrong village - what would you classify as unsustainable? We might be talking about different things. I’ve just checked, and where I live has a somewhat similar size. The local town might have 2000 inhabitants, the villages around maybe average at around 200 people. There’s a train station. There used to be several saw mills (I would like to see them return). Everybody is somehow connected to small scale agriculture, people keep sheep, goats, grow several field crops, tend home gardens, and tend forest land. The largest agricultural operations I see around here are poultry farms and berry plantations, but they are far and few between in desolate places and not destructive or disturbing in their current extension.
What we see around here: when too many people are forced out of small scale farming by political or economic reasons, the landscape starts to overgrow and wildfires start getting larger. One factor here is that a lot of the land around here is multifunctional land: my indulgent equines clear a few hectares of land which are covered with a wood crop currently, sheep and goat keep brush and brumble under control and clear fields after harvest. I also harvest several kilos of mushrooms and herbs every year just walking around the farm. The alternative to this setup: send some guys with machines to clear the land twice a year or risk the whole lot of trees burning down with a wildfire. And to do this service in an otherwise severely underpopulated landscape I only need an internet connection to get some cash in with my halftime remote job.
Some of these rural traditions and the ways different species interact to tend the landscape sustainably and efficiently have gotten lost (and in some places never really existed), but a lot of knowledge is still intact or can be recovered, and mixed with appropriate modern tech you can create a sustainable lifestyle that works in places where you cannot grow big grain crops - learning how to do this sustainably is another factor of what I am doing here. And I see that also the locals are aware of the challenges around water and climate change, and a lot of new ideas are coming in from locals returning from abroad and foreigners moving in. Of course there’s idiots, like everywhere, but I don’t think it’s all lost. I don’t know about island life, might be very different from this?
deleted by creator
Uh… no. That is definitely wrong. There are absolutely rural hospitals…? I can think of several towns with fewer than 5,000 people and have a hospital. There’s one some 10 miles from my house. There’s also an agricultural college about 3 miles up the road from me.
The hospital might have been placed there by your government for political reasons and is most likely highly subsidized. Or are you maybe talking about a much smaller health center that refers most cases to an actual hospital in the nearest city?
An agricultural college can’t be placed in a city for obvious reasons, but it very likely also has a catchment area of tens/hundreds of thousands of people, i.e. city sized, but is just placed somewhere where you can have study fields and so on.
The hospital is over a hundred years old. It’s a real hospital. It’s not a big hospital, but it’s where I went when a nail went through my hand and they had all the necessary scanners and a surgeon and stuff. I’m not sure why you’d just speculate otherwise? You consistently downplay the depth of rural communities and I find it frustrating.
First and foremost, I emphatically disagree in the strongest possible terms with your work-oriented concept of communities.
Second, and this is also a really, really important point, and this is actually something that often frustrates rural people about city people, but your life in a city requires a lot of material support from rural communities that city people tend to forget about.
In fact, virtually every single physical good in your life make has raw materials that come from a rural place. What is your house made of? Wood? That comes from rural loggers and sawmills. Brick? Gotta dig the clay from the soil. Concrete? That requires sand. Want to put in plumbing? The copper needs to get mined, along with any other metal, or things like coal. Glass? Silica is in the dirt. The gravel surrounding your foundation comes from blasting the sides of hills in rural communities. In most big cities, even the tap water comes from a relatively faraway rural community, oftentimes at great expense to rural communiites, and people need to live there to maintain it.
Sorry, I guess that came across the wrong way. I am also very much against defining a person’s “value” through the work they do as some people seem to do. But that doesn’t mean that the work they do shouldn’t be relevant to the community they live in and that it doesn’t make sense to combine workplace and habitat as far as possible.
As for the topic of resources needed to support cities… Obviously there is no denying that and I also don’t think I have done that anywhere in this thread. The entire argument rests on this need and that you can’t do without.
One of the points the author of the OP is trying to make is that the billions of city inhabitants can’t all move into rural areas because of how relatively inefficient rural life is compared to city life when it comes to resource use.
So absolutely is there a need for some people to live in rural areas and produce these goods and their highly important efforts are undervalued in our society (like so many vital jobs…).
But people claiming that all would be well if we would all just move into rural areas and do small scale farming are sadly very misinformed or don’t particularly care about other human beings.
How is this not denying it.
None of the things I listed are food or nature conservation.
But also, that world, in which only people directly involved with food live in rural places, fucking sucks for those people. Rural people deserve communities too, and they have them, because rural communities are actually full communities with depth and complexity (and real hospitals!). We don’t only exist solely to serve the urban core with food and/or resources. Farmers are people, and all people deserve community.
I’m sorry if I sound annoyed, but I kinda am. You keep downplaying rural communities, like saying that the hospital without which I couldn’t have typed this isn’t a real hospital, or that most of the people who make my life worthwhile shouldn’t live here. Like when I pointed out that to be able to farm necessitates the support of tradespeople and grocery stores and so on, you said they could just live in the city and commute here, and that maybe it’s more inconvenient for the villagers, but it’s more efficient – those are my friends and family you’re talking about. I want to see them not at our jobs, too. It’s actually pretty patronizing to tell people that their communities should be dismantled to make them more efficient in how they serve the urban core, just like it’s patronizing to assume we can’t have real hospitals. We have real lawyers, too, and bars and bowling alleys and there’s even a Chinese takeout place in my tiny ass town (though I admit that it sucks).
I simplified a bit with the only food production, but otherwise please take my comments in the context of the OP article.
I am not saying that existing rural communities should be dismantled!
But like the author of the OP article I am frustrated with people claiming that their rural lifestyle is sustainable and “if just all people would do like us” there would be no problem, which is just very naive.
You are though. I really don’t think you’re doing it on purpose, but if you read what you’re saying, you are.
On this, I wholeheartedly disagree agree.
EDIT: omfg, I’m so sorry, I am on mobile and somehow fat-fingered “disagree” instead of “agree”
Authority needs planners as well as enforcers. Sounds like you’ve already got the plan in place for the rest of us.
Come on, at least try to put some effort into your trolling 🙄
Doubling down on the fash-talk, eh? Bold move, Cotton. Let’s see if it works out…
You realize you’re accusing the creator of the Solarpunk lemmy instance (the place you signed up to), of being a fascist, right?
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. You’re the one supporting a solution that would dislocate millions, responding to logic with personal attacks, and topping it off with an appeal to authority.
This isn’t Hexbear dude.
I assure you that I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. I’m wondering if this is the kind of server where the power tripping mods ban accounts that question their authority.