Comment by sunshine-o
4 hours ago
Here is the solution nobody is talking about:
The population of the UK or Europe did not explode in the last hundred years. It did not even double.
The population used to be more rural and relatively self sufficient in terms of food. There is actually enough land in Europe to feed everybody, especially considering the great progress we made scientifically. You can actually sustain yourself on a few hundred square meters of land and you won't get fat and be healthier (in your body and mind).
The great migration of the local population to the city to get a good factory or a bank job is over I believe. But the country side is still empty.
The reason is it is hard to make the jump first and ending up in the middle of nowhere living with a few old people. Also your politicians hate independent people so they are not gonna encourage it. They would rather keep you in a constant guilty state about their vision of "climate change" while letting you board a 10 GBP Ryanair flight for a week-end city trip or order useless things on Temu.
For Europe and many other places, the solution to a more sustainable future is actually quite straightforward.
Europe’s big problem is the hindered of millions of climate refugees on the doorstep. Even the most open heart liberal will baulk at the population doubling or more in 20 years. The only ones promising a solution will be the neofeudalists
It’s ok when the AMOC collapses and Europe plunges into an ice age no one will want to live there either.
But Europe also have to stop believing they can solve the world problems and act on a global scale. This time is long gone, about at least a hundred year.
Every region, culture will need to find a path to sustainability in their own way. If the path they take is invading another region, it leads to war. Like it has been for thousands of years.
"Europe, you don't have global influence?" What is this? Disconnect, splinter and prepare for war?
2 replies →
Why would an open heart liberal have any concern with welcoming refugees?
Depends where they're coming from I guess. There's basically no where on Earth where people are as liberal as Europe.
No liberal would want millions of people coming from Afghanistan, for example.
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- mgimo finished? - aaaask
> your politicians hate independent people so they are not gonna encourage it
Your politicians are actually subsidising the rural lifestyle with direct and indirect transfers. Eg in Europe, you can buy land, leave it more or less abandoned and cash in agricultural subsidies.
I think you’re talking about subsistence farming, which plenty of places in Europe do practice. But it is hard work.
Subsistence farming would be farming to only feed the farmers with little excess left for trade, it's a little too keyhole in this context.
They're talking more in the direction of EU scale closed loop / closed cycle agriculture, in which a network of farms across countries interop to exchange resources (pig and chicken waste, for fertilizer, for example) in order to reduce or eliminate outside inputs (synthetic fertilizers from the Gulf, for example), but still work to maximise production for EU consumption.
Moving from the current situation to the situation you describe is impossible, because the UK has far too much debt and far too small an annual government income to pay for even the popular kinds of infrastructure spending, let alone the degrowth proposition you articulate. The millionaires really do take their assets and leave if taxes are raised and a Mossad-style international program to repatriate them in duffel bags would see the government that initiated it both out of power permanently and in cells themselves.
If they take their assets and leave, tax the land. They're not going to be able to take that when they leave.
Spaniard there, from rural background. Self-suficient... you wish. Post civil war even oranges were a luxury, something to be give as a present in Christmas. Any autharchic attemp, be left or right, just produced famines and misery.
I think the fundamental problem is the conflict between climate, family and live-style vs corporate interest and economic growth.
Ideally, we should want populations that are either not growing or slowly shrinking, but we can't have this because multi-national corporations don't want to invest in countries with a declining consumer base. We must therefore sustain population growth indefinitely.
Similar humans would presumably prefer more space – perhaps a home with a few bedrooms and a decent sized garden where they can grow a little food and the kids and play in the summer. But we can't have this because it's more economically productive if we increase population density such that people increasingly live in small flats within high-rise buildings with no gardens and little natural light.
And I get it, money is nice... People will trade a lot of things for more money, but the government ideally should not encourage this.
Ideally the government should be encouraging people to have a home with a garden. To have a couple of kids. To grow some of their own food. To work in their local community, and therefore obtain an education which will help them to be productive members of their community – rather than say taking a punt at studying journalism at university and hoping they'll get a job in some city 200 miles from home and their family.
Just speaking personally, the city I grew up in in the UK has become hell to live in over the last couple of decades. It's almost impossible to drive around today because of densification which has taken place. All of the local fields that I played on as a kid have been turned into cheap flats which has transformed the semi-rural area I used to live into an ugly anti-human concrete jungle. And because of the number of people now living around here no one seems to know anyone anymore – I walk outside my house and it feels like there's random people everywhere, and I've noticed many people around me don't even seem to speak English anymore.
It's such a strange thing we are doing... It really makes no sense for us to want to live like this.
Makes sense if you want to make money, and have money enough to not have to suffer the worst of it yourself. Of course, nobody voted for it, but those that promised not to do it and did it anyway were democratically elected, so only a fascist would take issue with it surely.
How is having a bunch of people move to the countryside going to make for a more sustainable future?