Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on September 14, 2014 | 5 Comments
I think it’s time for me to end my self-imposed exile from my own blog. I’m not completely out of the woods yet work-wise so there may be further service interruptions, but it’s been nice to see some ongoing conversations on the site since I posted my last entry, such as this one about permaculture, populism and Vandana Shiva and this one about nature mimicry. They’ve guilt-tripped me back into the blogosphere.
I aim to write some more on those themes in future posts, but for now I just want to post a few brief thoughts prompted by the issue of urbanisation – a favourite subject of mine on which I’ve previously written here, and here, and now here in my latest article for Statistics Views.
I won’t reprise my musings on the topic in the Stats Views article here. Instead, I just want to mention two points that I should perhaps have dwelt on a bit more in the article.
First, the notion that we’re now living on a ‘city planet’, with more than half the global population living in urban areas, frequently does the rounds in ‘eco-progressivist’ circles as a kind of shorthand proof that the tide of history is running against the possibility of small-scale agriculture or rural life more generally as a viable future for humanity. But the apparently simple fact of majority urban residence is quite misleading, and is something of a statistical artefact. Take India, the second most populous country in the world. ‘Urban areas’ there are defined in part as places with a population of at least 5,000. By Indian definitions, about 32% of its population is urban. But I wouldn’t define a place with a population of 5,000 as a ‘city’. How big is a city? Suppose you defined it as a place with a population of 300,000 – then only 19% of India’s population live in cities. If you take the twenty most populous countries in the world, which together account for 70% of the global population, then only 31% of their people live in cities of 300,000 or more1 – and I suspect the true figure is a bit lower, because of definitional peculiarities in China2. So maybe we inhabit not so much a city planet as a small town planet.
I think that’s important because, unlike large cities, it’s possible for a village or town or even a small city of 100,000 or so to be oriented towards and well integrated with its rural hinterlands. A small farm future is readily compatible with a small town future, but probably not with a big city future. Fortunately, though, we’re still a long way from really being a ‘city planet’.
There’s a lot more to be said about the ways in which small-scale farming and small town life can be mutually reinforcing and can promote better ecological stewardship and human wellbeing – some of which is said in the various references I cite in the Statistics Views article. But I’ll aim to come back to the theme on this blog in future posts. Generally speaking, I think mainstream commentators and self-styled ‘eco-pragmatists’ are far too prone to present a dualistic contrast between city life fuelled by large-scale industrial agriculture on the one hand and a miserable peasant subsistence agriculture on the other. In truth, there’s a lot of space to explore in between the poles of a ‘city planet’ and a miserable subsistence agriculture – besides which ‘subsistence’ needn’t necessarily be miserable unless it’s made miserable by the depredations of elites, who typically rely on some kind of centralised (urban) authority in their work of expropriation. But that’s a story for another time.
The second point is perhaps best encapsulated in Stewart Brand’s aphoristic comment that “city growth creates problems, and then city innovation speeds up to solve them”3. I can find plenty of evidence to support the first part of his statement, but not so much for the second. One contemporary arena for the debate is the notion of increasing industrial resource use efficiency – or the ‘decoupling’ of economic growth from growth in the drawdown of non-renewable or polluting resources. Some experts dispute the existence of decoupling4, whereas others find evidence for it5 – which has led some to make such ringing pronouncements as this: “For the first time in history, we are growing richer while using less energy. That is unalloyed good news for budgets, incomes and the planet. We have reached a technological tipping point.”6
But as far as I can see, this statement is simply wrong, because it confuses absolute with relative energy use. It may be true that we’re producing more per unit of energy use globally than we used to, but we’re also producing more, period. The result is that we’re using more fossil fuels than ever before – 43% more petroleum in 2012/13 than in 1980, 127% more natural gas, and 105% more coal7 – and we’re emitting more greenhouse gases than ever before8. So on the face of it increased resource use efficiency seems positively associated with increased resource use. The Jeavons paradox rides again, perhaps?
In any case, the closer we approach the reality of becoming a ‘city planet’, the more I suspect absolute energy use and emissions will increase. As Rees and Wackernagel put it “cities have become entropic black holes drawing in energy and matter from all over the ecosphere (and returning all of it in degraded form back to the ecosphere)” (citation in Statistics Views article). All the more reason, I think, to try to hang on to some notion of carrying capacity and articulate a vision for a small farm, and perhaps a small town, future.
References
1. Figures calculated from Files 1 & 15 of UN Urbanization Prospects, 2014. I can’t be bothered to calculate it for the world as a whole – I spent long enough messing about on spreadsheets as it is – but I suspect the global figure would be even less.
2. See, for example, http://demographia.com/db-define.pdf
3. Brand, S. 2009. Whole Earth Discipline. Atlantic Books.
4. Eg. Jackson, T. 2009. Prosperity Without Growth. Earthscan.
5. Eg. http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel/decoupling/files/pdf/decoupling_report_english.pdf
7. http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=5&aid=2
8. https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_1002_en.html
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It is interesting that the urban vs. rural is often voiced in terms of major urban areas vs. rural. I’m most interested in working on ways to reinvigorate the links between small farms and small towns. I’ll leave big urban areas to sort out their own future. But the best of what humanity can be, in my opinion, is found in that intersection of the small and scalable. Welcome back.
So yes, welcome back!!
Will have to have a look at your Statistics Views piece another time. We’re coming up on a busy time here and I’ll not be able to spend as much time on this as I’d like.
Is citification a word (to become more city like)? If not, perhaps it should be. Then some wag can make the comparison to acidification. But my instinct is that citification isn’t such a horrible thing. There are some VERY old cities (and population size as a metric to define a city may well be a moving target… needing to be 100,000+ a few centuries ago would have disqualified many urban areas often considered cities). But take an old city like Rome or Jerusalem. They keep building and rebuilding upon their past(s). New issues come up and they find ways to solve.
If we want to consider improvements to our stewardship of the land we currently ‘use’ as sparing other lands for nature (I know – there’s controversy there as well) – then for me the moving of some folks to the city allows space for those who choose to stay behind.
And yes – the Jeavons paradox rears its ugly head still again. This may be a human nature issue deserving much more attention.
Back from the field and having now read your 11 Sept piece on Urbanisation (for others, follow Chris’ link in this blog entry above) I have a few thoughts:
You observe that urbanization shares a history alongside the field of Sociology. And from what I’m gathering, there may actually be some sort of causal association in this co-emergence. And I’ve no quibble with this. But I do want to wonder aloud if there isn’t something amiss in your next statement that begins:
“With poor working people clustered for the first time in urban slums…” [referring to nineteenth century history]
So my quibble here centers on – “for the first time”… because I can readily imagine that 1st century Rome possessed slums full of slaves, Babylon too would have hosted a community of slaves. Institutional slavery has a very long history. Feudalism might be considered a slight improvement on outright slavery, but it accomplishes approximately the same outcome for the dominant social strata… allowing a more luxuriant existence with less personal work (due to the labor of others) Moving further up a scale we can see indentured servitude being at least a contractual path to move upward. These social relationships are not causally linked to urbanization, but it seems apparent to me that increased population density at least facilitates them. Indeed it may well be that building a city in the first place requires some sort of stratified society. I’ll defer to sociologists on that front.
Not a quibble, but a wink and a backslap for the paragraph noting the significance of ‘Scope 3’ emissions. Nicely done!
All quibbling aside, I enjoy living away from an urban core. That said, I imagine the head counters probably include me in the metro statistics for one of the U.S.’s top 20 metropolitan districts. I’m hoping that simple statistic doesn’t make me a hypocrite.
Hi gents, sorry I’m caught up in another frantic period of farm work, but I’ll aim to get back to you regarding those interesting comments next week.
Chris
A quick response to the comments above: Brian, agreed – though unfortunately it’s the big cities that usually call the shots, and the way they sort their problems out is typically by displacing them onto other people and other areas, which I guess would be one response to Clem’s point that some big cities have existed a long time and have sorted out their problems. On Clem’s point about urban slums in history, I guess I was applying that point mostly to modern-ish British history rather than to the whole history of the planet. So yes, there were big ancient cities like Rome & Babylon. I’m not well versed enough in classical history to know if those ancient elites ever worried about slavery. I doubt it – nobody did in Britain until the late 18th century, but when they did it was the beginning of the modern public sphere, which has many interesting implications. The Romans certainly DID worry about the non-enslaved plebs, however: Rome was so big because it could import grain cheaply by sea from Egypt and it could buy off the urban masses with bread and circuses just so long as it could keep expanding militarily and fund itself with foreign tribute and an overtaxed peasantry. Didn’t work in the long run though, and I don’t think our modern mega cities will either. Though cities have their uses, I don’t really agree that they’ve facilitated freedom and material progress historically – something that I aim to write about at more length soon.