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The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Solarpunk Farming
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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.
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.
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?
Well, that sounds like one of the few places where most people really are still working in agriculture and/or landscape conservation, which is great.
But that seems the rather the exception from the rule, at least as far as "developed" nations go. In the rural villages (in Europe) I had deeper insight to, maybe 10% of the population is still active in agriculture, and maybe another 20% indirectly in support services or landscape conservation. Some higher percentage do some small scale backyard farming, but really nothing on the level that would have much impact on the overall landscape.
The majority are rather working in jobs in the nearby towns (or are retired) and going there everyday by car. And driving long distances for the smallest of things is considered normal and "necessary".
Basically everything is highly dependant on fossil fuels, from transport to heating etc. And the houses are large and need loads of heating / AC due to bad insulation. I have seen an increase in solar-systems though, because of higher homeownership rates, but that's really insufficient compared to how much energy is wasted otherwise.
In the specific case where I currently live there is also loads of tourism, which adds to all that.
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.
Well, I don't know the exact situation there, but generally speaking it is not viable to have a typical hospital in a community of just 5000 people. It just doesn't work out economically (even under ideal assumptions), which means other people must pay for it without benefitting from it, which is not exactly fair.
It's not exactly fair in the same way that it's not exactly fair that we have to grow food for you guys in cities. We do things for each other because we're a society and being a society is cool.
I disagree, there is nothing wrong with asking rural inhabitants to come to a nearby city to get treatment in a hospital, if that means that the service of this hospital can benefit people equally instead of it being monopolized by a small number of rural inhabitants.
And no one is forcing anyone to grow food, rural inhabitants are not enslaved by city dwellers.
But a society needs a certain amount of food and other resources for a given number of people, there is just no way around that if you don't want people to starve.
So what is your proposal to this? We can't continue as is, and moving all the city inhabitants to rural areas is clearly also not feasible.
Would they not have a hospital/emergency care facility that is appropriately sized to cater to the needs of that particular community? I don't really see how it would be a significant a drain on resources for a rural community to have that, unless I'm not accounting for something. And if that smaller hospital is adequate for the community, wouldn't that reduce the burden on the larger city hospital?
I could see them still being required to go to a larger city hospital for more unique problems that require specialists, but for more standard care, on the surface it seems like a local hospital would be a good thing to have, especially since there might be doctors that would prefer to live in a rural area anyway, which would cut down the energy needed for their own commute if they instead had to work in a city hospital.
Maybe I am a bit more specific with the definition of "hospital".
Hospitals typically means 24/7 full care with a significant number of in house patients.
A larger health center might offer 24/7 emergency care and some ambulance services, but is typically not equipped and staffed to deal with anything other that short term ambulant care.
Ah, I think definitions may be at the heart of the disagreements I've seen here. From what I've read just now, a health center in Europe and other places with universal healthcare is, as you say, a place with emergency care, but with only a small amount of beds available.
In the U.S., a health center is seemingly exclusively used to refer to a facility that cares for people without medical insurance or low-incomes, and does not relate to the size or capability of the facility.
So I think some of the other users here (if they're US based) may be getting the idea that when you say there shouldn't really be hospitals in rural areas, you're advocating for having no in-patient medical facilities in rural areas of any type, and to require anyone with any sort life-threatening or serious immediate medical problem to travel to a city to resolve it, since for us, 'hospital' is pretty much a catch-all term for anywhere that can perform serious medical procedures, where as non-serious issues (colds/flus, diagnoses, getting prescriptions) are handled by Clinics.
EDIT: We do have Urgent Care Centers though, which could be an equivalent to Health Centers? I'm not entirely sure, I haven't really used the medical system that much thankfully.
Hmm, yeah I can see how that could cause some miscommunication. But AFAIK this isn't only a European thing but also how the WHO classifies various types of health infrastructure.
I think the real point of miscommunication between us is your concept of efficiency. Literally everything about our modern, western life is unsustainable, no matter where you live. Urban places are less inefficient, but they're still monstrously unsustainable. In the United States, even if you stop traveling, heating your home, and barely even eat, you still live unsustainably due to the government that operates a military on your behalf.
To actually live sustainably, we have to fundamentally reimagine society. I don't think it's at all obvious that this new society's rural communities need be unsustainable. In fact, I do think, as I said elsewhere, that any sustinable world is going to necessarily have more rural inhabitants, because the agricultural workforce will probably have to expand a lot, and probably be significantly collectivized, if we want to fix our food system.
I don't think it's a definition thing. I am US based but I've actually spent much of my life in Europe and my entire family lives there. Rural hospitals are not urgent care centers or health clinics. They're smaller but they're 100% real hospitals in the sense that both Americans and Europeans (at least in Spanish) use that word. They have 24/7 emergency care and can deal with serious health problems. However, they're not all "trauma centers." Trauma centers are a network with different nodes of various "levels," and different hospitals are certified at different levels of trauma care. There's usually only a couple of "level 1 trauma centers" in a region.
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"
Ok let's assume it would be feasible for a second and the 50 thousand or so people from the nearby city would all move into your rural area. Not only would that totally destroy your rural community that you are so protective off, but it would also require a lot more resources that what they currently use, and that is already unsustainable. So what exactly is your proposal then? Just let these 50 thousand people starve to death?
(I'm going to answer both comments here)
I don't know why on earth you think I'm arguing for everyone to move to rural areas.
I propose the abolition of capitalism, along with the abolition of markets, to be replaced with democratic planning, not, like we have now, an economy premised on one dollar one vote, in which the wealthy decide what we do. I want a society that looks something like "from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs," a classless, stateless society, in which people can live in rural places or urban areas, and we work together to make both sustainable, healthy, and pleasant.
It's a big dream. I don't expect to see it in my lifetime, but I also know that in my lifetime, the climate crisis is coming, and things are going to change whether we want it to or not. I think it's worth dreaming the dream, and telling other people about it. I hope that the dream can influence the decisions we make when change is forced upon us.
But it's also not just a dream. I am a member of research collectives and academic groups that are actively working on democratic planning. I founded a worker cooperative. I farm cooperatively with other people, too. I try to make the dream real in small ways, and I hope other people do too, because if we all do it, then it becomes real in big ways, and maybe things won't be as bad as they look like they're going to be.
That's what attracts me to solarpunk, and why I'm here.. I love the dream it embodies, with its unabashed utopian aesthetic.
Also omg I’m so sorry, I am on mobile and somehow fat-fingered “disagree” instead of “agree” lmfao.
Lol, ok never mind then 🤭
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.