Comment by fasterik
7 hours ago
This is a completely nostalgic, one-sided view of the urban vs. rural divide. It's also ignorant of the data on the impact of cities on nature.
Cities have a lower carbon footprint per capita, lower land use per capita, people own fewer cars, use public transportation more often. If everyone lived in a city, nature would be better off.
People live in cities because they are vibrant, they have culture, the arts, intellectuals, innovation, etc. Yes there are areas with high traffic and noise, but there are also quiet neighborhoods where everyone walks everywhere, you can pop into a bar or a cafe on every corner, eat 20 different types of cuisine, go to a book store, go see a show on any night of the week.
Your picture of the friendly villagers might be true in your experience, but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.
> Cities have a lower carbon footprint per capita, lower land use per capita, people own fewer cars, use public transportation more often. If everyone lived in a city, nature would be better off.
I think that's apples to oranges. If we didn't have cities, we also wouldn't have eight billion people in the world.
A better question for the parent is how do you enforce that vision of everyone living on their 20 acres in harmony with nature? This is not something that capitalism or some other -ism does to us. Your neighbor will have children, these children will have children, and before long, you have a settlement of 50 people on these 20 acres, most certainly no longer living in harmony with nature. At that point, they must build infrastructure. That infrastructure may be feasible to build if they pool their resources with the neighbors. Boom, you have a village, then a town, then a city.
So what's the solution here? Do we forcibly sterilize people? Lock them up if they have children? What's the anti-growth strategy we're actually advocating for?
> If we didn't have cities, we also wouldn't have eight billion people in the world.
Could you break down the logic that leads you to this conclusion?
Im sure it's deeper than "if cities disappeared right now, a lot of people would disappear with them"
Because the habitable surface of the planet is less than 100 million square kilometers and only a fraction of that is suitable for subsistence farming. The only reason we can accommodate 8 billion is that the majority of them live in high-density settlements and that food is grown on an industrial scale elsewhere.
1 reply →
This is obviously not a reversible trend. People having close proximity to one another, creating economies of scale where everyone does what they are best at instead of everyone doing everything for themselves is what allows big cities to be possible.
I'm sure all of this was inevitable as there likely hasn't ever been a time where humans were not getting together to form communities when it was beneficial to do so.
So what's the solution here? Do we forcibly sterilize people? Lock them up if they have children? What's the anti-growth strategy we're actually advocating for?
You don't need to. Fertility rate per woman in wealthy countries decreases every year.
Growth is natural, overconsumption is not.
> Do we forcibly sterilize people? Lock them up if they have children?
Oh give me a break. Developed countries have had below-replacement fertility rates for decades.
If your goal is to reduce birth rates, we do the things that we already know do that naturally: comprehensive, fact-based sex ed; cheap and easy access to contraceptives; social safety nets and support; etc etc etc.
It's not a mystery and it's not even difficult. You don't need to jump to straight to abhorrent crimes against humanity.
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+1, I think you're spot on.
Albeit I feel like OP was right on something else: his grandparents weren't heavy consumers, but that transcends city vs rural debates.
I see us modern people, except very old folks being extremely heavy consumers.
Sometime I pay attention to my friends and relatives and how much do they consume.
E.g. I spent 5 days with my mother in December at my grandmas and I've noticed that she just bought stuff non-stop, but her metric is money, not "stuff".
So, e.g., she bought a new pillow for my grandma even though my grandma didn't need/want one (she doesn't use it), bought plenty of plastic toys for her own dog, bought a set of new dishes just because the old ones were old, changed her worn phone leather case for a new one, bought plenty of Christmas lights because she didn't want to dig for the old ones she couldn't quickly find, bought some kind of table hook for purses for herself and her friends, etc, etc.
At the end of the week she didn't even spend 250 euros (her metric), so she doesn't realizes, yet, the amount of borderline useless stuff she bought was major and her ecological impact quite huge, especially for how little to none the payoff or utility is.
I had colleagues in my office, back when I was in the office, that just had Amazon packages coming every single day...And here's a smartphone holder, here's some gadget that keeps your mouse cord, here's a yet a new pedal for the drums, here's a set of pens, here's a rubber duck to talk to when debugging, etc, etc.
I mean, I have even a difficult time pointing out that there's something wrong with any of those items per se in isolation, but when it's a lifestyle of non-stop consistent consumerism I think the trend is worrying.
There's so many things that are so cheap nowadays that it's hard to say "why not?", yet they feed into this endless life style that's toxic for the planet but feeds this neverending more more and more.
Yeah, but unfortunately false nostalgia for subsistence farming is widespread and has traction in the discourse. I guess it's probably because every American who ever suffered from that lifestyle is dead, in other words the same reason that it is now increasingly popular to die from measles.
In reality, the laser-leveled, fully-automated, county-scale factory farm is the only reason anyone on this forum has ever experienced the phenomenon known as "free time".
Farming is harder than people who haven't done it think, and surviving on the production of only your family's property is really, really hard. Source: I grew up in very rural areas, and I've seen what it entails. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression in a farming community on a homestead.
However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two.
It's possible to put a little effort into gardening, share with your community, and massively reduce the overall cost of food while still having free time.
> However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two.
The gradient is where you start to consume a lot of carbon unnecessarily.
> eat 20 different types of cuisine
The city I live in, this can be 20 different variations on onions and garlic, and cabbage passes as salad.
But you do realize that all the positives are mostly hedonistic ?
Yeah, there are more places to enjoy yourself and have fun, more entertainment.
I'm passionate about going out to clubs, electronic music events, concerts, restaurants, flying around on a plane or driving my car on the endless roads.
All of this is great, but according to TFA and my own experience, we're absolutely shitting on the natural world to have our nice drink or exotic food which will be gone from our system in 12h.
We've 'borrowed' from the future generations to have our fun and I'm not sure it's all worth the price.
Sure, the positives for urban life are hedonistic. The point is that the positives for rural life are also hedonistic, just less recognizably so.
Don't project the emptiness of your existence on the rest of us. Cities are the only reason we have orchestras and ballets, vibrant sports leagues, and other things central to family life. I do not want my kids to have to live in a "village" too small to field a brass quintet.
> Don't project the emptiness of your existence
The irony of such an unnecessarily hostile opening line is ... Absolute cinema
(It's ok if you don't get it, Jeff. This comment is for other people)
That's only because cities outsource their carbon intensive activities. There is no "divide" here. It's one planet and focusing on the wrong categories has destroyed your ability to reason.
That's simply not true. The per capita emissions account for things that are produced outside of cities like food. The primary sources of emissions from individual human activities are food, energy production, and transportation. High density areas are more efficient at providing people's heating and transportation needs. As far as I know, people in cities don't eat more food than people in other areas, if you control for income/standard of living.
It's not only because cities outsource carbon intensive activities. Sure, there's some of that with farming, mining, etc. that must be done elsewhere. But there's also lots of savings from things like residents walking/biking/using public transit instead of driving, living in more efficient apartments, etc. The suburbs are pretty wasteful, they don't generate anything unique and they just waste more resources.
Suburbs are still mostly urban, it's right there in the name. Rural != suburban.
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As someone who is sensitive to noise, rural areas bother me far more than urban ones. Traffic is low-frequency and only rarely annoying, but the few times I have lived in rural areas or gone camping, I have been woken up repeatedly by the horrific screeching of birds. Louder, shriller, less predictable than any city noise.
There are birds in cities too, and they are annoying, but they are thankfully drowned out by the cars.