Lots to unpack in this somewhat ranty article, but also some food for thought.
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On the topic of urban/rural divide I am thinking there is probably a third way to look at it. But yes, somewhat controversially I agree that most people should probably not repeasantize and rather live in cities for most of the time.
Sure cities come with some logistical problems regarding food supply and can’t self-produce most of their food, but on most other metrics they are vastly more efficient and for the most part also more desirable places to live (which is why the percentage of urban inhabitants is constantly growing).
Basically I think only those directly involved in food production (or nature conservation) should permanently live in rural areas. But I also think there should be much more exchange between rural and urban areas, with urban inhabitants regularly staying in rural areas temporarily during summer season both for pleasure but also to help out with labour intensive harvesting tasks.
The latter probably needs some cultural shift though. Instead of getting cheap migrant labor (and treating them very badly) it needs to become more of a positively connotated thing for city inhabitants to go on “farm holidays” each year. I think this would not only help with the labour crunch in farms, but have a lot of positive knock down effects for all people involved, but of course it needs to be sufficiently mechanized to not become back breaking labour either.
As a side note: there is another mode of work - construction of things outdoors - that is also difficult to handle in a dense urban area. Welding, cutting, grinding, even mere hammering - do any of those outdoors in a densely populated place, and you’ll have annoyed neighbours - and their complaint about noise / light pollution is at least somewhat justified. Leave half-processed materials around, and there’s a risk of someone taking them.
In a sparsely populated area, not much of a problem. :)
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).
urbanisation is a long term mostly voluntary trend
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.
Basically I think only those directly involved in food production (or nature conservation) should permanently live in rural areas.
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.
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.
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.
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These kind of services have a natural catchment area and have always been located in cities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How is this not denying it.
Basically I think only those directly involved in food production (or nature conservation) should permanently live in rural areas.
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).
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.
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.
That was really good, even if I’m missing some context. We on the left honestly have a blind spot for what global food production actually entails. I live on a small, previously abandoned farm that I’ve been slowly fixing up, getting it to at least do something, and that pretty tiny exposure to trying to make food beyond the scale of a garden has rocked my goddamn fucking world as to the politics of food.
You often see leftists very confident that going vegan is the main (or even only?) thing that we need to do to fix our food supply, and then on top of that, maybe we add some organic and permaculture or something, maybe with a dash of local first. Unfortunately, food is way more complicated than that, and we have basically no idea how to feed the entire Earth’s population without heavy use of fossil fuels as both inputs and fuel, even if we all go vegan, no matter how much I’d personally love a local-first permaculture world where all our lawns are tomatoes or whatever.
If you’re interested in this topic, Sarah Taber also writes about it a lot. She shares this essay’s view on the dangers of food nostalgia, though she tends to focus on the American obsession with the family farm, which is actually an insanely inefficient and stupid way to farm (I can now personally attest to this), from both a modern and historical perspective.
Yeah, some interesting thoughts.
Going mostly vegan would definilty open a lot of land for other farm uses, both grazing land that could be converted to tree orchards and conventional agricultural fields currently used to grow maize silage, but I agree that it would not solve the fundamental issue of temporary food insecurity in many places.
The thing with animal agriculture is that it’s efficient in terms of capitalism. We are really good at growing corn and cutting hay with virtually no human labor, and then we can very cruelly stick all the animals in one giant torture lot to feed them. The perishable product comes out year round, so you can invest in an efficient and constant supply chain without a complex warehousing situation, and corn/hay/silage/whatever is easy to store.
I don’t see any way to a sustainable, ecologically sound, less cruel food system within capitalism. It’s going to involve a lot more human labor. Even if we want to eat mostly grass (all grains are grass) like the cows do, and, as mentioned in the OP, like our peasant ancestors did, which wasn’t a particularly nutritious way of life, we still have to deal with the fundamentally unsustainable way we grow grains today: Spraying pesticides (including herbicides and insecticides) to literally kill everything but the special pesticide-resistant corn, and dumping petrochemicals that are nutritious to the corn itself but devastates the topsoil, and so on. Our farmlands today are functionally productive deserts.
In the US, we are functionally incapable of growing anything labor-intensive without migrant labor. Even where I live, in Vermont, with the most hippie dippy organic farms per capita going on, all our beloved orchards that aren’t pick-your-own rely on seasonal Jamaican migrants, whose special visa status also includes artificially set wages by the federal government, otherwise it just wouldn’t work. All our economically sustainable dairy operations rely on illegal migrant labor, because there is no dairy visa since it’s not seasonal. Everyone I know who wants to farm has a job doing some sort of farm regulation thing instead, like organic certification, and they farm on the side, often barely breaking even – all this while hunger, especially child hunger, is rapidly increasing in our area.
Basically, the entire thing is fucked.
Okay, I’ve read half way through before realizing that this is part of a fight (discussion?) between two prominent proponents of urbanism/tech and small-scale farming?
I know where my heart is - with the small scale farmers. However mentioning the heart would already disqualify me from this discussion.
I also know that I am 110% the well-fed food-nostalgist who has her imported coffee in the morning and her self-raised pork and home-grown veg at night. Why? Because that’s how far I manage to go with my skillset to keep at least some of traditional knowledge alive.
I think there is something deeply dishonest in the numbers he presents - for one, he mentions famines with political causes. Lets be honest - most of them are - so not small-scale farming was to blame, but colonization or insane top-down political decisions. Then, about how yields are calculated: how do you calculate the yield of a truly biodiverse farm? Between animals, vegetables, energy in form of wood, energy and nutrition in form of manure and mushrooms I might have over 50 species here, plus the ones I forage. Try and compare this to ‘x tons of [crop] per ha’.
What we see in the numbers of famine and today’s feeble attempts to recreate traditional farming is that colonization, urbanization and industry has caused an enormous loss of skills. With every displaced person who had to leave their family garden we lost a small patch of high density food landscape and the skills to tend it.
I also don’t understand why Monbiot accuses people of wanting to go back in time. It’s a bit unfair, because nobody really goes and 1 to 1 recreates the farming life of last century (unless you are in a cult or sth). We combine old and new, we use electricity, we get stuff in from elsewhere if we must. We actually start reconsidering which tech is worth using, and which does more damage than good.
Wanting to recover the traditional tech that was good and useful and got destroyed by industry or politics isn’t hollow nostalgia. Wanting to shorten food transport chains where it’s possible isn’t promoting starvation.
Nah, I can see where Monbiot is coming from in some way. A lot of the homesteading nostalgia movement, especially when people are just starting out with it, is so naively optimistic, so arrogantly sure of itself while proposing their way as the only way … But to reduce the small-scale farming movement to just this is dishonest and is not the discussion the green left (if such exists) should be having - but hey if those bros want to write whole books to fight each other let them do it.
TLDR: Tradition yes, tech also yes. Stop fighting dudes.
Regarding the famine topic: I understood that differently. I think he is saying that (previously quite common) famines are all but eradicated except for those caused by political issues like wars etc. I think this is true and easy to overlook as indeed there is a mostly well working global market to transport grain surplus over long distances (although the Ukraine war has shown it is more brittle than most people assumed).
Small scale farming does not really produce large quantities of grain surpluses that can be easily shipped around the world or stored in large emergency stocks.
In a way this is of course more efficient, because why produce such surpluses that outside of emergencies have no real use and need to be sold cheaply to be converted to industrial alcohol or fed to industrial livestock factory farms.
But the question is, what can replace those large grain producing farms as a stabilizing factor counteracting natural variability of regional food production? Sure, localized backyard farming helps a bit, but I think it is likely insufficient and mainly helps against malnutrition by supplementing main staples with additional food of higher nutritional value.
You mention somewhere that you think people move to the city mostly because living conditions are better, I think that is only true in some cases. Sometimes, conditions in their rural home regions or homelands are made unliveable for political reasons, so people are forced into cities. Some people are being made promises about their possibilities in a city. Sometimes a mix of both. Not every rural family who ended up in a city ends up thriving.
I’m also still somewhat suspicious about big grain and the numbers presented. Are we really working with accurate numbers here, or are these numbers incidentally collected and published by big grain and their friends from the fossil fuel industry? I remember having read something about small farm producing a majority of the food, only to find out that it refers to these numbers from the World Economic Forum of all places, where a farm is considered small at under 200 hectares which is just plain ridiculous. The article then goes on about big almond/pistachio farmers, more of those super-food growing water wasters and landscape destroyers. So all these numbers are made up by somebody with one interest or another, and paper is patient, as we say in German.
I guess this whole discussion suffers from one enormous problem: both sides go on a lot (often based on a very blurry understanding of history) about ‘people should’, which is
- decidedly un-anarchist and
- causes proponents of the opposite opinion to fear that they will be re-peasanted/urbanized by force.
I believe the preference for rural/urban or any spot on the spectrum in between the two is diverse, and close to the heart/identity side of a person, maybe comparable to gender. At least it is like that for me. Moving out of the city and re-peasanting myself was a very early step of self-confirmation for me, and setting myself up with the right mix of rural and urban is important to me. If I was forced to live in a city (at least the currently available versions of cities) I would be considered mentally disabled very probably. And it being as clear and obvious as this for me meant it took me forever to understand that this didn’t mean that living rural is 'the right thing to do’TM , but that each person has their preferences, and that some people are happily and fully urban.
What I think we could do, instead of argueing what is better, is recognize the difference between these poles of the urban/rural spectrum and recognize they exist. I imagine, in a caricature of the real thing, some academically educated urban folk, all clean and sitting politely at a table, and a horde of mud-slinging peasants has their elbows perched on the other end, spitting while they speak and smelling funny, and hopefully some translator to aid the conversation. The challenge is in understanding where each side is coming from. The tendency of some young people to want to change their surroundings (like me from urban to rural, and the other way around for many kids who grew up rural) can help with providing a living bridge between the two ‘cultures’ (not sure what a friendly, but difference-affirming term could be?) in a solarpunk future, maybe.
Obviously rural areas need people involved in agricultural production year round and I never said anything else.
But I do think that it is somewhat of a problem that the majority of the rural inhabitants have very little to do with any of that these days. Add to that the continuing encroachment of sprawling suburbs that destroy valuable farmland and you really have a set of extremely unsustainable living conditions only made possible due to the cheap supply of fossils fuels.
As for the numbers, sure big agriculture is good with lobbying governments, but the author of the OP article is a relatively well known environmentalist from the UK that did a lot of research on this for his recent book. I find it rather unlikely that these are fudged numbers from lobby firms.
But I also think people are misunderstanding what he mainly says. He doesn’t say that relatively small scale farming can’t on average feed the human population, but rather that our current model of resilience against the natural variability of food production (which is going to get much worse with climate change) is build on a massive overproduction of cheap grains that can be easily stored and shipped around the world.
Unless we want to face massive naturally induced famines again, we either need to maintain this model (which seems increasingly unlikely to be physically possible) or urgently find another way to improve food resilience, and small scale farming doesn’t seem to be able to do so.
And on a side note: brutal conflicts between small scale farmers and nomadic people that are reacting to natural variability of food availability are almost as old as humanity itself, and really not a future I would like to see on a global scale.