Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
Posted on September 15, 2024 | 89 Comments
There’s one last bit of business outstanding from my previous project critiquing ecomodernism. This concerns the forces that may drive either ruralisation or further urbanisation in the future. In comments on this site, perhaps most relevantly here and here, Cameron Roberts disagreed with my view that future ruralisation is likely – and that if we don’t try to make it happen by design soon, it’ll happen by default later. I said I’d offer a longer analysis of this issue, and here it is. I’m going to structure it around Cameron’s comments, but his points are widely held so I see this post as staking out more general ground.
First, there are some important framing issues to discuss.
Cameron’s comments are inflected with a sense of limit-transcending choice, which is representative of much mainstream opinion – but problematic. For example, he writes that he lives in a Canadian city with growing extremes of heat and cold that are not survivable for humans without heating and air conditioning – hence, “we WILL need [air conditioning] in the future given the level of climate change currently locked in” and “demanding people live without air conditioning is signing their death warrants”. Electrified urban transport systems are another essential in his vision.
I think this reveals a widespread assumption of modernist culture that what people want or need they will somehow (through technological innovation if necessary) be able to get. But, for better or worse, I think this is untrue. My position stems in large part from the view that, like it or not, we cannot have low-carbon, high-energy settlement patterns worldwide in the future that match current patterns of urbanism, especially at existing rich-country levels of energy availability.
This suggests that, at best, we might face trade-offs. Maybe we could have air conditioning, but not transport – or some air-conditioning and some transport, but at lower-than-present levels. What would urban life look like in that situation?
More likely, I think it suggests significant human population movement, at least in the long term. If the city where Cameron lives is not survivable without high-energy and high-tech gadgetry, then my punt is that there’ll come a time when nobody will be living there. Or maybe there will be some people living there, but many fewer, and their way of life will look more like that of the area’s premodern residents.
That punt is complicated by the fact that access to energy isn’t evenly distributed worldwide. It’s likely that Canada and other rich countries will be able to maintain high-energy urbanism for some time to come, while people in poorer countries will bear the brunt of climate change without a high-energy cushion. Climate-indifferent urbanism for the rich, climate-challenged ruralism for the poor. I believe we should face the future together fairly, worldwide, rather than assuming someone will invent a cunning techno-fix that allows poor countries to enjoy the energy cushion we currently have in the rich countries, so that we don’t have to change our ways. But ultimately I suspect some of these choices will be out of our hands – out of an increasing number of people’s hands, including in the rich countries – as they already are for many of the global poor. We might want air-conditioning, dense transport networks and so on. But an increasing number of us probably won’t get them.
Cameron’s implication that I’m somehow signing people’s death warrants is a little aggravating, but at least his approach is generally serious and issue-focused, and he doesn’t liken me to the Nazis as one ecomodernist has. Still, I think it’d be good to try to take some of the heat out of this debate by reserving phrases like ‘death warrant’ and ‘Nazi’ for the kind of people who wish others to be deliberately killed. For my part, I do not ‘demand’ that people live without air conditioning. But I do think that policies to promote urbanism on the grounds that urban networks are more efficient will result in greater mortality when it transpires that they’re also not affordable in the long-term. This brings us to questions of efficiency versus cost.
Many of the debates about social futures, including the urban/rural one, are bedevilled by confusions between the concepts of efficiency and cost. There’s no question that to provide people with services that are organised and paid for by human society, there’s usually an efficiency gain with greater residential concentration because of network benefits. So, for example, the cost per capita to provide a densely settled city with the necessary transport links to serve its urban metabolism (food, energy, water, sewerage, work commutes etc.) is lower than the corresponding cost would be to provide that same metabolism for widely spread rural houses.
But that tells us nothing about whether those urban costs can continue to be paid in the long-term. And it doesn’t address whether the rural costs need to be paid at all. Can we afford to build and maintain the urban network, and the services it’s delivering? If not, we need to rethink. The case for ruralism lies in the fact that we may not be able to keep paying energetically for the intensive networks required in a heavily urbanised world, but it’s possible that nature can provide for free many of the services that we have to pay for in the city, if we spread ourselves out thinly enough so as not to overwhelm her. Or else she affords us the opportunity to do without them. Costly transport systems are essential in cities so that people can get to work and otherwise serve and be served by the network. They’re not so essential if work, energy, food, water and sewerage are all close at hand, as is feasible in less concentrated rural situations.
In one of his comments, Cameron makes some points about the superior efficiency of electricity, of electric grids in densely-populated areas, and of other energy services like transportation. He writes that this is a knockdown argument against the anti-urbanist position, and that someone trying to claim otherwise would have to counter at least one of those three points. I think they can all be countered rather simply by making a single point – he’s picked the wrong variable. What matters more fundamentally than efficiency is cost.
They can also be countered more complexly by getting into specifics about the nature of the costs in each case, which I’ve done to some extent in the case of energy here and in the case of food in Section (4) below.
But let me not be too dualistic. It’s unlikely we’ll be able to afford current levels of urbanism in the future, but that doesn’t mean we have to spread out evenly, miles from neighbours, isolated in rural space. In practice, people tend to concentrate at multiple levels: in hamlets, villages, small towns and larger provincial ones, among other reasons exactly for the network efficiencies that Cameron mentions. The past few decades have witnessed breakneck urbanisation worldwide, and also the growth of mega-cities, to the extent that the majority of the world’s people live in urban areas, with more than 7% of the entire global population now living in just thirty cities/agglomerated urban areas (like Tokyo-Yokohama). These thirty cities occupy in aggregate a square with sides less than 200 miles across1. Suggestions by the likes of me that this recent trend is not sustainable and that there’s likely to be a need for some future ruralisation are often treated as an abhorrently extremist or city-hating form of ideology. I find this baffling. To me, it seems more extremist to think that concentrating over half a billion people in the equivalent of a 200-mile square represents an acme of sustainable civilizational progress.
Cameron writes “to be persuaded of the energy advantages of small farms over apartment blocks, I need to see specific answers to how exactly these energy demands will be met in a small farm future? How will we heat and cool our homes? How will we cook? How will we travel? This stuff needs some brass-tacks answers.”
Fair questions no doubt, although the same applies in reverse, of course: show me how you’re going to fund energetically the food, water, sewerage, heating, cooling, transport and industrial metabolism of a majority urban world in a low-carbon global future. I’ve not seen convincing answers to this, which is why I think things will default to a more rural future than the present, if we don’t arrange for it in a more orderly fashion first.
I have given brass-tacks answers by way of negative example on this front, showing how it’s unlikely existing energy use can be sustained long-term through low-carbon electricity and showing how it’s really unlikely that mass nutritional needs will be met through microbial foods. But I’ve found people tend to shrug off such analyses as if nobody has made them and then renew their demands for quantitative proof that high-energy urbanism, microbial foods and what have you are unsustainable, or else dismiss the case for lower-energy agrarian localism as mere nostalgia.
So, sorry, I’m not falling into that ‘brass tacks’ framing trap again. It’s a case of show me yours first. What I will do below is lay out briefly and schematically some issues that I think urbanists and ruralists less battle-weary than me might usefully try to clarify between themselves.
I was in Paris recently and saw an apartment of 10m2 on sale for €120,000. If everyone on Earth occupied an apartment of that kind of size, we’d all comfortably fit into a space the size of Britain. Hopefully I don’t have to explain why that wouldn’t be a good idea in terms of network efficiency, let alone on other grounds. But that’s where an over-simplistic emphasis on the scale economies of increased residential density ends. So it needs to be complemented with a counter-emphasis on the scale diseconomies of increased residential density. I’d like to see that kind of discussion, and what kind of optimum settlement patterns would emerge from it.
I doubt that discussion would point to settlement patterns as dense as our present world, where – as I mentioned above – over 7% of the population live in thirty cities occupying in aggregate a square with sides of less than 200 miles. It strikes me that the emergence of that kind of density has less to do with grid efficiencies and more to do with property values (somebody’s doing nicely out of selling apartments at €12,000 per square metre!), trade and economic policies, and energy abundance. David Orrell has argued that things like the populations of present cities involve fractal patterns, and “fractals are a kind of signature of complex organic systems operating far from equilibrium, which tend to evolve toward a state known as self-organised criticality”2.
Self-organised criticality implies the likelihood of rapid collapse, which wouldn’t be a great thing for city populations, or anyone else. In the face of present fractal settlement patterns, I’d suggest it might be better to start optimising on resilience rather than on efficiency. This implies loosening rather than tightening the grid, dismantling its hard spokes oriented toward urban centres and ramifying softer rural loops. The language here is ruralisation, soft-energy paths, micro-grids, limits, optimising for local needs and so on.
It may be true that energy and other costs can be optimised in theory with dense urban settlement. It may also be true that they can’t be optimised in practice given past decisions about urban location that create path dependencies inappropriate to present circumstances. About half of the world’s thirty biggest cities are located on coasts, for example. With the sea level rises expected from global heating, it’s probably not a great idea to encourage further population concentration in them. Likewise in relation to growing aridity and water stress. The USA’s second largest urban area, Los Angeles, doesn’t look a good bet on either count.
Possibly, new urban centres could be built in place of older, badly sited ones. But the costs of the new build would have to be offset against the supposed efficiency gains. The same may be true in reverse for processes of ruralisation. The difference is that in the case of rural smallholdings the infrastructure costs are more modest. You don’t have to build such huge transport, water, sewerage and food networks, nor skyscrapers and other energetic drains.
Rural smallholdings often aren’t part of a gridded water network at all, but sink their own well or borehole. Possibly, this is less efficient in terms of money or energy cost per litre of water provided. On the other hand, the rural smallholder is or soon will be aware of the absolute limits of their water resource, and is therefore likely to use less than an urban on-grid consumer with access to cheap municipal water. In other words, going back to questions of cost and efficiency, there may be cost-efficiency trade-offs that point to the greater longevity of ‘inefficient’ rural residence.
Another cost-efficiency trade-off is the urban heat island effect. Efficient city grids may be able to supply each joule of air-conditioner energetic cost at a lower price than in the countryside, but they’ll need to supply more joules and this has to be put into the cost-efficiency equation.
One final cost-efficiency trade-off I’ll mention arises specifically in relation to renewable electricity. Wind and solar farms are usually sited where wind and sun inputs are highest and – more importantly – where land costs are lowest, given their relatively land-intensive character. Usually, this is a long way from where people are clustered in dense urban settlements, meaning that grid costs are higher – maybe even that grid provision is less efficient. Of course, you could relocate cities closer to the energy source, but this would push the price of land up. For sure, you’re not going to find wind or solar farms where land costs €12,000 per square metre, or indeed orders of magnitude less. This trade-off seems an intractable one for renewable energy. Renewably powered cities may be less efficient than they theoretically seem on paper.
Cameron writes that the only advantage of rural living in relation to water issues is in sewage treatment, and that the energy costs of wastewater treatment are between and eighth and a quarter of total water energy costs – so, potentially a significant cost in an energy constrained world.
High urban population concentrations generally aren’t great for people’s health in the absence of good sanitation and other environmental public health measures. How certain is it that such measures will be sustainable long-term? Clearly it wouldn’t work to argue ‘city living is superior to rural residence in every respect except the devastating cholera epidemics that regularly decimate the urban population’. In other words, there may be sufficient conditions in low energy situations that militate against urbanism no matter what other theoretical advantages it has. We may be a long way from that reality today, some places much further than others, but it’s possible that a trade-off is looming. Sewerage, air-conditioning or a functional transport network? Is it possible that there’s an energy threshold for all three, below which urbanism becomes untenable?
Cameron’s remarks focus excessively on network efficiency and assume that the items furnished by different kinds and scales of network are the same. So in the case of food, the issue for him is simply whether urban or rural networks are optimised for delivering this undifferentiated and generic thing called ‘food’.
That’s not how it works. The type and scale of network affects the kinds and quantities of food produced and consumed, and this matters. To cut a long story short, urbanism and the resulting long commodity supply chains tend to encourage the overproduction of cheap cereals and grain legumes, which aren’t particularly great for human health or ecological integrity.3
They also tend to encourage the overproduction of expensive luxury foods in ways that destroy the sustainable resource base. For example, in his interesting history of fishing in Britain, Casting Shadows, Tom Fort describes how the salmon fishery on the Tweed, which had been managed fairly sustainably for a long time using small boats and local netting stations, was quickly undermined with the arrival of offshore fishing boats looking for new catches after the collapse of the herring industry. Over a ton of salmon were caught before 6.30am on a single day in 1961 and sent to London. Despite efforts to rein in the plunder, it wasn’t long before the Tweed fishery collapsed in turn.
It would probably be wrong to blame urbanism or ‘London’ per se for this, but there are affinities between urbanism and overexploitation of food resources which are mediated by the high-energy, high-capital, long-supply chain economies that urbanism requires. Generally, there needs to be tighter local feedback between producer and consumer with economic teeth of the kind that long and competitive supply chains can’t provide. This is encapsulated in ideas like the ETC group’s distinction between the industrial food chain and the peasant food web.
Another way in which networks can have autonomous effects relates to famine and hunger. The suggestion that food localism – the peasant food web – is a formula for mass death is standard ecomodernist fare, but that’s rarely the case except where there are unforeseen and catastrophic dislocations. On the contrary, strongly networked food economies typically enable food to be shipped out to the highest bidders, potentially creating local want – as shown generally by analysts such as Amartya Sen and Alex de Waal. I discussed a historical British example here. Sen has shown convincingly that hunger is caused by lack of social entitlement, not lack of network efficiency.4
Finally on this issue, the case for urbanism is often made along the lines of the positives associated with independent network effects – concentrating people together creates greater economic action and wealth creation. Not everyone agrees that this is so, but if it is I think we also have to consider this as a negative. Since we seem incapable of decoupling our economies from increased fossil energy use, resource drawdown and nature destruction, greater economic action and wealth creation can’t really be considered an unalloyed good. In the present state of the human game, the lesser economic action implied by more distributed communities with less capital and energy availabilities than is typical in the modern city who are more focused on producing diverse wholefoods for themselves could bring many ecological benefits.
It seems likely that persisting urbanism within existing global political and economic circumstances is going to lead to some bad energetic feedback loops. Drawing on Brett Christophers’ work, I mentioned some of them in this comment and this essay, in relation to the electricity crises in South Asia and Europe of 2021-22. Heatwaves, electricity shortages and blackouts; lower-income country governments scrambling to bring fossil power stations online, higher-income country governments supplementing renewables by buying fossil energy on global markets, pushing energy prices out of the reach of poorer countries, and so on. Air-conditioning for rich people, and not for poor people. Renewable energy for rich countries, and not for poor countries. More fossil fuel use, more climate heating.
I don’t claim that ruralism magically solves our future energy problems. I just think that it offers the potential for lower energy use. I also think that in circumstances of major energy constraint life is somewhat less unbearable in rural areas than in urban ones, and that people will ultimately therefore vote with their feet unless they’re forced to stay in cities and face the music. Governments do have some power and incentive to stack the odds artificially in favour of urbanism at the expense of rural people, but they’re not omnipotent and they can’t keep doing this everywhere forever.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all energy approach in rural situations, unlike in the urban case (renewable electricity!) Generally, it’s easier to substitute natural and biotic approaches for primary energy-based ones in rural situations (shade, water, biotic energy). That may not be enough – it’s just that it seems to me likely to get closer to enough than will be possible with grid-dependent urbanism. If governments were sensible, I think they’d be moving might and main to ease the transition to lower-energy ruralism, not least by identifying ways of supplementing the not-enough of natural and biotic approaches with sensible rural soft energy paths. Unfortunately, this isn’t the model they’re signed up to.
A final word on biotic energy, specifically on what Cameron calls ‘traditional biomass’. Addressing himself to pro-rural commenters on my website, Cameron wrote:
There were a few suggestions that wood stoves should handle most of the cooking and heating. I can’t see this as anything other than a recipe for catastrophic global deforestation, with consequent climate-ruining land-use emissions, and ecocidal impacts on habitats. I’m sorry to be blunt, but it is just not a serious proposal.
I’m not sure how well-founded this bluntness is. A lot of people don’t seem to realise that when you ‘cut down’ a tree, it can grow up again. If you manage such harvesting carefully, it doesn’t necessarily cause deforestation, net emissions or ecocidal habitat impacts. It certainly can do, but equally it can facilitate afforestation, carbon sequestration and habitat integrity. Everything depends on how you do it, how much you do it and what you do with the harvest. Conversely, ill-considered supposedly carbon-offsetting plantations can have all the negative impacts Cameron mentions. Generally, people who know how to live in and work woodlands long-term (back to the local feedbacks I mentioned in Section 5) can do so pretty sustainably, provided they’re not lured into overproduction by the blandishments of the wider (urban) economy and its endless resource extraction.
Cameron might be right that biomass combustion alone is inadequate to meet people’s energy needs. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be a serious proposal for helping to meet some of those needs (possibly a more serious one than importing American woodchip to make electricity in the UK, as currently happens). But his comment is of a piece with the current mood music of mainstream and ecomodernist narratives about the non-seriousness of biomass. Blunt pronouncements along the lines that everyone knows such-and-such a technology is non-serious can be an effective way of stopping people from asking questions about the seriousness of the high-tech alternatives. And people need to ask those questions.
I’ve raised more questions here than answers about the relative merits of the urban and the rural. If other people would care to dig into them in good faith and careful detail, I’ll look with interest at what they come up with. It’s unlikely I’ll do much more digging myself. As a lone, independent writer I don’t really have the resources, and I think I’ve already done my share of it over the years. Besides, bigger drivers of ruralisation are upon us. While – as per framing issue 4 – ecomodernists would love to send their critics down endless rabbit holes to ‘prove’ the ruralist case, there are more important things to be doing right now.
Claims that existing (or augmented) patterns of urbanism are more pro-social and pro-nature than rural alternatives appeal to people’s contrarian nature. And since most people live in urban areas, especially in the rich countries, it also tells them what they want to hear – that they’re doing the right thing, and their way of life is ecologically optimal. Unfortunately, I think this is probably untrue.
David Elias Shaping the Wild: Wisdom from a Welsh Hill Farm
Sarah Langford Rooted: How Regenerative Farming Can Change the World
Guy Shrubsole The Lost Rainforests of Britain
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS
https://slaynews.com/news/government-report-calls-all-airports-closed-comply-net-zero/
In addition, the report states that the public will be required to stop doing anything that causes emissions, regardless of its energy source.
According to the report, this will require the public to never eat beef or lamb ever again.
Those who consume meat and dairy products would be in violation of the law of the Climate Change Act, the report warns.
The unfolding dystopia ……
Do you have a link to the actual report? I don’t think Slay News is a very trustworthy source.
Beyond that, I’m not at all convinced that Net Zero commitments will actually be adhered to by any government.
There’s a PDF download on the page
When I tried to follow that link I got a warning that it wasn’t secure, so I didn’t download it. From what I can tell it seems like Slay News have downloaded the report and thrown it up on a random server somewhere, possibly modifying it in the process. Or maybe it’s one draft of the report and not the final version, or one possible set of recommendations among many, or some other thing.
If they actually want to inform people, rather than just stir up resentment, they should link to the actual source much more clearly. They don’t seem like a reputable source of news.
The PDF link in that article goes to the UK FIRES research organization which created the report:
https://www.ukfires.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Absolute-Zero-online.pdf
From page 6 of this 2019 report (including “beef and lamb phased out” by 2050):
2020-2029
“All airports except Heathrow, Glasgow, and Belfast close with transfers by rail.”
2030-2050
“Beef and lamb phased out…”
“All remaining airports close.”
The “About Us” page at UK FIRES dot org has this:
“UK FIRES takes a pragmatic approach: we focus only on technologies that are available to us today and exclude those that have yet to be proven at meaningful scale, since they simply may not be ready in time. In 2050 we aim to meet the energy demand of UK society by non-emitting electricity generation.”
“In December 2019, UK FIRES released the “Absolute Zero” report, a ground-breaking description of the operation of the UK with zero emissions by 2050, without relying on as as-yet un-scaled energy sector or negative emissions technologies. This pragmatic but striking view of the journey to zero emissions has attracted widespread interest including a full debate in the House of Lords in February 2020.”
Thanks for this, Steve. When I went to download it I found I already had a copy, so maybe the error I got was from a slip of the finger onto some other link on the page? I’m not sure.
I still don’t particularly like the time of the article. “Some people told the government in 2019 that meeting Net Zero will be very difficult with our existing technology, but could theoretically be done with steps that look drastic to people who don’t like change” doesn’t seem, to me, like cause for alarm.
Looking at the report itself, the recommendations regarding lamb and beef appear to be based on the ruminant methane emissions thing yet again, which is frustrating at best, given that the deer that would replace cows and sheep in re-wilding schemes are also ruminants. I will absolutely grant that we should stop eating CAFO-produced ruminant meat, but that’s just not the same thing as giving up eating ruminants entirely. I’m pretty sure that by 2019 I knew that methane doesn’t last nearly as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide does, so their failure to look at the nuance here makes me wonder what nuance is lost in the areas of the report that I know less about.
It’s interesting — and relevant to urbanism Vs ruralism — that while the FIRES report writers say we will need to eat more locally produced food and reduce shipping and personal transport, it doesn’t occur to them to recommend moving closer to the source of our food, producing food closer to our homes, or even working from home instead of commuting where that’s possible.
But I still don’t think the UK is going to meet its Net Zero commitments — or not through government coercion, anyway.
The question needs to be asked is , why do people live in cities ? It comes down to that is where you can get good pay at a level that sustains them , take away cheap plentiful energy and the majority of jobs disappear , VW is a case , energy in Germany is too expensive and they have built in low cost countries like China, will their workers stay in Wolfsburg or move ? US rust belt cities have emptied , our coming problem is when every city looses its competitive edge and entire countries loose cheap energy have to learn to live on much less .
I have said many times without AC many southern cities become uninhabitable , Las Vegas a city of several millions had a population of 27 in 1902 , electricity and pumped water made Las Vegas it will also break it when it disappears .
Without electricity most cities employment becomes redundant office blocks will become a wasteland .
On and off the subject , this week I talked with people selling battery tractors , on a average large farm tractor ( 150 to 500 horse power ) the battery pack will weigh something between eight and ten tonnes to work a 12 hour day and will take around 24 hours to recharge if you have a supercharger and the grid to feed it , that puts the average big ish tractor in the twelve to fifteen tonne bracket , can we say a compaction problem !
Tangled and probably tangential thoughts on urbanism and maybe on ruralism too:
– Intuitively I feel like as long as we have a climate where we can successfully grow cereals and grain legumes, we’re going to end up with cities in some form. Granaries have one heck of a “network effect” and so do standing armies. But I don’t expect those cities to look like what we think of as modern cities.
– It’s also interesting to look at patterns in the population of modern cities. London shrank from 8.6 million in the 1930s (I can’t remember whether 1931 or 1939) to 6.8 million in 1991 before starting to grow again, and only topped that earlier number with 8.8 million in 2021. I don’t know how much of that was rail and car infrastructure making commuter towns into a reality and how much was other factors
– conversely I’m pretty sure there are periods in London’s history when it was growing despite repeated cholera outbreaks, so, what was that about? I think it was more than just network effects attracting people, but also the consequences of enclosure making rural life less tenable
– I can imagine some current governments attempting to incentivise re-ruralisation, but I think the chances of an orderly reversal of various forms of enclosure is extremely unlikely. So: what does a disorderly reclamation of the commons look like in the context of a supersedure state? I know, I know — it depends on the particular local conditions.
– I was up late processing oilseed pumpkins last night and then got up early to cycle to church with them and I am, frankly, absolutely cream crackered. The journey isn’t a very long one (about six and a half miles on my usual route), but if it were a shorter one I wouldn’t have had to get up so early. There are complicated and good reasons that my church is so far away, and the regular cycle journey does mean my foraging is much more fruitful than it otherwise would be (one of the parks has lots of dryad’s saddle, another has a quince tree, you know the deal), but even with an e-assist bicycle — a truly remarkable machine — I am acutely aware of the friction introduced by geographical distance, in a way that I suspect people who buy all their food from supermarkets (or have it all delivered) are not.
Chris wrote: “It strikes me that the emergence of that kind of [urban] density has less to do with grid efficiencies and more to do with property values (somebody’s doing nicely out of selling apartments at €12,000 per square metre!), trade and economic policies, and energy abundance.”
Yes, as described by UCLA professor Stephanie Pincetl:
“Cities concentrate wealth and power; they are now the primary habitat for humans. As the hydrocarbon economy enabled increasing applications of machine power to extract resources and value from the planet, grow more food with less and less people, and transform humans into urban dwellers due to work opportunities, those remaining in rural areas are increasingly marginalized…”
“Yet, cities are seen as beacons of hope for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and restoring planetary health, places of ‘sanctuary,’ tolerance and resistance against nationalist ideologies. The discrepancy between city capacity to effectuate change and expectations about their autonomy to do so, is insufficiently understood and examined. Financialization of real estate that is global in its reach, the spread of extreme inequality and homelessness in nearly all Western cities, are beyond the capacity of cities themselves to address. These trends are not reflections of national or global geopolitical priorities. They are consequences of a global consensus on neoliberal economic strategies that have concentrated wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and created an economy where little reinvestment in the commonwealth takes place.”
The Nation-State and the City
Stephanie Pincetl
https://www.spincetl.com/home/2018/9/23/the-nation-state-and-the-city
Thanks for this Steve!
UCLA professor Stephanie Pincetl, mentioned earlier, writes about “the mistaken assumption [that] cities are de facto more energy efficient” and calls for curbing rural to urban migrations.
“These facts lead to the inevitable conclusion that cities can no longer be built the way they have been since the 20th century, nor can their scale be sustained… If we are to seriously reduce GHG emissions, and the concomitant energy flows, the only way forward is to develop pathways that curb rural to urban migrations, keeping people on the land and able to make a living, and urban living will need to be far more modest. As we have seen with the impacts of the Covid epidemic and the war in Ukraine, supply chains are fragile. Global physical balances of trade go from the least affluent regions to the most affluent, leaving the poor behind while resource consumption continues to grow [28]. It will be necessary to resurrect local resource provision and to encourage diversity instead of uniformity as in seeds and agricultural practices, building materials and land development, a concomitant requirement for the less affluent areas to thrive. How this should come about is one of the big questions before us today, as researchers, and as planetary inhabitants, and will no doubt require diverse and multiple strategies…”
“Our current approach, including increased urbanization and the mistaken assumption cities are de facto more energy efficient ignoring their inputs that require high energy expenditures in places of origin of materials and goods, means catastrophic ecological collapse, increased poverty and alienation, and nearly unlivable heat in many of the parts of the world where people are being forced into cities.”
Cities are not isolates: To reduce their impacts a change in urban-rural interdependencies and the direction of modernity are required
Pincetl, 2022
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666792422000221
Stephanie Pincetl also describes what a small farm future could look like in California:
“The Road to Change”
“Fundamental to the kind of transition described above – to low to no hydrocarbon inputs, and low to no irrigation – will need to be a vast change in land holdings. Large corporate farms will be broken up into small units, as had been originally envisioned with the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act that funded water development in the west and required parcels to be no more than 160 acres per person or 320 per couple. Even 160 might be bigger than necessary under this new regime. Farmers, under the Newlands Reclamation Act law, were required to live on the land to receive federal water. Going forward, the small farm will be necessary for new reasons beyond the exigencies of the Anthropocene: the small farm is of a scale that is highly productive due to intensive agricultural practices. There is ample, and often ignored, evidence that intensive small farming can be fecund, but it is generally diverse, so by modern standards, yields on small farms don’t match up, acre by acre, with agribusiness as they are growing a variety of crops. However, small farms will enable a peasantry whose dexterity and intelligence supplemented with appropriately scaled machinery, local knowledge and mixed cropping methods, to create a vibrant new agricultural regime in the state. This type of intensive, localized agriculture will also help to revive indigenous ecosystems, including the great inland lakes in the Central Valley that were once fed by flood waters off the Sierra Nevada mountains. The restoration of ancestral lands to Indian tribes will also have to be woven into this hopeful collaborative future to restore the state and shape California’s Anthropocene. Towns will grow in the adjacent areas to serve peasant agriculture as such agriculture will not require hydrocarbon-based chemical inputs from far off factories, and peasants will no longer rely on agrochemical companies for seeds.”
“New, and different processing facilities will also need to be built, also employing smart low energy and electrically powered machinery, leveraging human ingenuity and skill in these processes, from threshing and bagging of crops like lentils or sesame, to the drying or canning of fresh fruits and vegetables to the pressing of oils. Hybrid systems in which fine craft and judicious use of human labor will be coupled with nimble machinery will emerge in local artisanal workshops. Fiber crops such as hemp, flax, and cotton may provide inputs to new types of products for the state, such as thread, fabric and rope and twine. Silk is also possible with the cultivation of silk -worms grown on mulberry leaves from orchards. The scale of this processing will be modest, crop yields may vary annually depending on rainfall, and production will largely serve California.”
“This new agroecological peasant agriculture will also create many new jobs. Though lands that were brought into production by the sheer application of fossil energy, like the Westlands, will go out of production and the footprint of agriculture in the state will shrink, many more people will work the land. The local multiplier effect will allow people to live in smaller towns dotted in the agricultural areas, offering different types of livelihoods for people now confined to cities as corporate agriculture has squeezed livelihoods and local knowledge out of rural areas. Occupations, in addition to farming itself, are numerous in this future: composting, growing beneficial insects, bee keeping, building and maintaining small scale irrigation systems, manufacturing and maintaining new electric powered agricultural machinery and processing equipment, food processing, weaving, the making of rope and twine, technical assistance, local commerce such as distribution, retail and social services. Transportation infrastructure will rely on smaller electric vehicles and a backbone of electrified rail, servicing the smaller towns, and could include some animal power. Vibrant modest local economies can then thrive from this peasant agriculture. Cities like Los Angeles will continue to exist, but will be considerably smaller, and local land will be reclaimed in places for agriculture…”
For a Resilient Agriculture in California: Looking Back to Move Forward
Stephanie Pincetl
https://www.spincetl.com/home/2022/7/31/for-a-resilient-agriculture-in-california-looking-back-to-move-forward
@Steve L
Thanks for that. Looks like an interesting read.
Thanks Steve.
What nearly everyone ignores about California agriculture is that it doesn’t rain in California during the growing season.
When I lived in northern California, we would regularly get two meters of rainfall in a year.
Plenty!
Except it all fell between October and April. If I wanted a tomato I needed to irrigate.
And that was in the north. In central and southern California the rainfall is often a quarter of that, and mostly during February.
There is a reason the natives concentrated their agriculture on oaks and other perennials.
@Chris Smaje
I find it odd that people can extrapolate from your suggestion that cities will become unsustainable, that you are wishing people to starve etc.
Like you says, let’s hear the evidence of how cities are going to be maintained on ever declining fossil fuel inputs. I’m guessing, Renewables will be the response.
Just because you predicted, based on the facts as you see them, that something is going to happen, doesn’t mean that you want it to happen.
I agree with your arguments and conclusions. I’m less inclined to argue the toss with people that disagree.
After all, what will be will be.
Are cities sustainable ? You should check out US cities ( and from what I hear UK cities , infrastructure is falling apart as well ,30% of N York’s water is lost by burst mains , no time scale on fixing them road and rail bridges collapsing are not that uncommon either , potholed roads ….. Vermin ( 2and 4 leg kind ) public services on life support , so no we can’t sustain the cities we already have .
Did you really just refer to two-legged vermin?
Would you like to clarify who you were talking about?
There are such things , rapists , murderers ,child molesters and such .
Thank you for the clarification.
Pigeons and seagulls?
This is an interesting article on the limits of renewable tech.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/08/mm-11-renewable-salvation/
Its interesting that you start with framing issues – to me this is so important. Mostly the energy and environmental challenges we face are addressed using narrow boundaries/frames – so for example the electrification of transport is talked about simply in terms of theoretically possibly renewable energy generation and then declared feasible – wider boundaries might include other calls on that energy, resource scarcity imposing limits on the building of the necessary infrastructure, the likely cost of maintaining the infrastructure, the pollution associated with the lithium required to provide batteries for x million cars, buses etc etc. I think our current predicament requires we think with wide boundaries – narrow boundary thinking (reductionism) got us into this mess.
Also you mention ‘wealth creation’ which is something I found myself musing about the other day. My conclusion was that there’s really no such thing. In an essentially closed system such as the Earth (I know sunlight!) something appearing somewhere must always have been taken from somewhere else. It seems to me that the very idea of ‘wealth creation’ is simply a refusal to read both sides of the ledger – in fact we’ve denied that the other side of the ledger even exists – in an over crowded world, where we’ve used much of the available resource that’s no longer a tenable approach.
I’m somewhat obsessed with wood as fuel and dismissing it seems ignorant at best. We’re currently getting much of the fuel for our wood burner from some hedge we’re laying – we do a bit each year and in a dozen years or so we’ll be back where we started cutting it again – in the meantime the hedge is stock-proof (i.e no fencing required), has trees and shrubs at a range of ages (most of the hedgerow trees around here have been lost over the years so for now there are few mature trees in the hedge) etc providing a wide range of habitat. The hedge we’re currently laying is an enclosure hedge planted in the late 18th century – so its certainly a sustainable way to manage the boundary.
For now our wood burner only provides heat which annoyingly doesn’t circulate around the house as we’d like – I have ideas for how we might vent it out of the room with the burner in it but I’m wary of making the situation worse i.e sucking in cold air rather than venting warm. So a bit more thought is required before I start putting holes in walls.
What really interests me are rocket mass heaters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater) – the problem is if you build one in a house you’d probably find your house insurance was worthless in the case of a house fire. But the efficiency of these things is very very high (see here https://www.batchrocket.eu/en/9-english/8-workings under ‘exhaust gas measurements).
One of the problems we have with how we think about heating is that we think about heating the air in a room/building – probably the least efficient way to transfer heat to human bodies – but things like heat pumps, touted as ‘the’ solution for low carbon heating don’t challenge the basic inefficiency of using air to transfer heat to a human body. A mass heater heats a mass that radiates some heat but which is designed to be sat on or laid upon – a much more efficient way to transfer heat i.e you need less heat and therefor less fuel to stay warm.
And these stoves are designed to burn small wood – it gives better combustion – which makes them ideal for burning the sort of wood one might be harvesting from coppice on fairly short rotations (10 to 15 years). I’ve seem figures suggesting a rocket mass heater might burn a 10th of the wood of a conventional stove – that might be optimistic, I don’t know, but if they can efficiently utilise more of the wood coming out of a coppice that’s irrelevant.
And the UK needs coppice – its one of the habitats we’ve lost most of over the past 100 years or so and which gets least talked about – wild flower meadows and wetlands are prettier perhaps. Beyond that coppiced firewood is probably a net carbon sink as carbon is sequestered in roots and leaf mould.
To me it seems that burning wood as fuel, done well could help address a range of ecological problems – wide boundary thinking leads to better solutions as far as I can see.
@Bruce
I’m a big fan of rocket stoves and their potential.
I’ve made and am tweeking one at home.
It’s a stand alone unit rather than a mass heater, but the combustion principles are the same.
Trying to get mine to work on wood pellets which will then lead onto working with cut up twigs.
Regarding house insurance…….
I think that when we start going down the degrowth side of the graph, insurance as well as pensions will be some of the first financial products to go/crash. With unaffordable house insurance, it will just be down to your own assessment of the risks of installing a rocket stove mass heater against the rewards.
I see RSMH as only a bridging technology though.
They aren’t a long term solution as the flue pipes and oil drums will be difficult to manufacture post-growth. Will probably see me and my kids generation out though.
Collect all the components now, whilst you can!!!!!!
Thank you Chris for a great summary of the urban/rural discussion, I agree with your conclusions and diplomacy. Good to see that some in academia (not pushing a corporate agenda?!) also agree, based on research and studies – regards Pincetl and the other paper you linked to from the last post.
I think Bruce’s point about wealth creation is interesting – in relation to Pinetl’s sketching out of the rural economies that can emerge from a largely peasant society – which I’m excited to see discussed here.
I’m with you, it’s become embarrassing to listen to an ecomodernist perspective with its cringing naivety about corporate and governmental motivations and the logistical realities of the physical world. Anyone who has ever chatted to opinionated teenagers will know the feeling – hey I was one once! But these are not teenagers and as the paper you sited shows, this ecomodernist green washing is becoming the cover for the next era of enclosure and industrialism- under the guise of digital dematarialisation. So, this is important work, alas there will be more to do!
Thanks Chris.
Yes, urban areas clearly feature greater economic action and wealth creation, as you say.
But as Steve L suggests above, one must ask for whom?
One doesn’t need to read very much of the current news for it to become quite clear that wealth creation serves wealth concentration. And everyone knows that if your wealth is in the form of urban money it is much easier to tax (or steal) than if your wealth is in non-urban oilseed pumpkins.
So it’s easy to make a good argument that “… life is somewhat less unbearable in rural areas… “ as you say, but since most of we westerners are urbanized, we have no clue about how to live well without all the energy intensive goods and services we grew up with.
As with most problems (at least here in the US) the answer is lack of imagination.
Just picking up on a few points made in the comments.
– Certainly agree with Kathryn that cities in some form are likely to persist. All I’m trying to say above is let’s not overdo it with the inherent urban superiority narrative. Still, I do believe that grain states and standing armies can be more vulnerable than one might think – I’m not convinced that the present degree of political centralisation globally will endure.
– Kathryn asks “what does a disorderly reclamation of the commons look like in the context of a supersedure state”. Excellent question. I have some ideas that I hope to share in due course, but in the meantime I’m interested to hear other people’s thoughts.
– Thanks for the discussion about the FIRE report. The section on food is pretty risible. People are so damn locked into consumerist framings about the climate impact of specific products (often with poor metrics), rather than thinking holistically in terms of livelihood geographies. I’m 100% on board with the urgency of rapid decarbonisation, but I do sometimes feel the greenhouse gas numbers game leads people to miss the bigger picture. I wouldn’t be surprised if a political head of steam builds here in the UK around penalising ruminant farming. I’m not averse to trimming the overall herd size, but generally I think this will have to be resisted, or at least given more nuance than in that report.
– Agree with the points made by various people about wealth creation. Not sure I’d go so far as to say that there are never trade-off free win-wins in terms of gains in wellbeing, but I believe they’re much rarer than contemporary mainstream narratives suppose. If someone’s gain in welfare isn’t based on someone’s loss somewhere else, as it often is, it’s usually based on loss to nature. A failure of imagination indeed.
– To John’s point about my position on deurbanization, exactly so – I think it will happen because it will have to happen. I don’t want it to happen chaotically and in ways that cause distress to people, and I don’t want people to be forced against their will to do anything. In relation to all that, I’m calling it as I see it, not as I want things to be. There *are* aspects of ruralism and agrarian localism that I think are positives and would like to see more of (there are also aspects of them I see as challenging). But that’s a whole other story.
– Thanks also John for the link to Tom Murphy’s blog. I like his writing. I’ve read him from time to time but it’s not obvious to me how to subscribe to his blog and get notifications from it. Any advice?
– Thanks Steve for reminding me about Stephanie Pincetl’s work. Very much to the point.
– Regarding the word ‘vermin’, I prefer not to use it in relation to either people or animals. There are both people and animals who cause people harms that require a response, possibly a violent one. But I don’t think it serves any good purpose to elevate that into a category of generic despising. Please avoid here!
I certainly think the present degree of political centralisation of power is something of an anomaly, enabled by so-called cheap energy which makes it easier to impose top-down order and exploitation beyond the true limits of economies of scale. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve said things like “If your business can’t survive by paying people a living wage, then it isn’t a viable business, and your quarrel is with the wider societal forces that have backed you into this corner, not with employees who want to eat.” (We could have a whole conversation about whether wages are really a good way to reward people for their labour, of course, and the myriad benefits and hardships of not earning enough money to pay income tax. As a musician I am frequently asked to work for free, because that part of my work is seen by others as leisure, and my general rule of thumb is that I only work for free if it’s sortof my idea.)
I want to say that grain states historically tended to fall apart after messing up the soil fertility by too much extractive grain farming (or at least destruction of the cyclical flooding that brought them fertility in the first place), or by exhausting some other natural resource which gave them an energy advantage and therefore a military advantage, but that is probably an oversimplification. It’s certainly true that military fossil fuel use today is quite frightful.
I don’t think of cities as inherently superior, though they are where I have spent most of my life. I am not even sure those of my ancestors who left farming really thought city life was better… my grandfather still kept a potato patch and had a root cellar (or “cold store” as he called it) despite being a huge believer in The Wonders of Scientific Progress. But it is what I know, and as much as I might yearn for a more rural existence, making that leap is seriously non-trivial for me even with the various privileges I do have. I have a few loose ends of plans to do something different, but for now I am committed to making the best of it where I am until that no longer works. But “My household chooses to remain in a city, because leaving requires more capital than we can scrape together” is a very different thing than “cities are better, actually”.
I wonder if some of the defensiveness you encounter when you suggest that perhaps increasing urbanisation is not the best way forward (or even a possible way forward) is due to a similar feeling of “well, this is what I’m stuck with, got to make the best of it” — people trying to extrapolate from what you are saying about the general trajectory to what they personally should do, realising that the ideal rural life is impossible for them, and trying to soothe the resulting dissonance by shooting the messenger. I don’t know, of course — people have their own reasons. Maybe some of my own tendency to point out “cities will still be here, they’ll just change” is part of a similar impulse, even… I hope that despite my own situation, I am at least able to accept that cities are likely to change drastically and that a substantial drop in urban population will probably be part of that. I see people leaving cities for more rural locations as one of the better events that would lead to such an outcome (disease, famine and warfare can also drop urban populations substantially, without anyone having to go anywhere, though in reality all three will also tend to prompt migration — even COVID saw a little mini-wave of people getting out of London if they could).
…but I also grew up taking long car trips through the Canadian prairies, and seeing many abandoned farms and the occasional ghost town. There were a number of reasons for those places to be abandoned, local conditions surely played a part in some while others were more obviously to do with global economic patterns. I’m not entirely sure why I see that as part of a fluctuation rather than evidence of some kind of inherent superiority of cities, except that my own relationship with the land I tend is something that I take into account when making decisions about how and where to spend my time even now, and it’s grounded in growing cycles but also in community commitments (I’m never anywhere far from my own church for Holy Week and Easter Day, for example, and Christmas has some similar baked-in commitments). In my childhood, I had a love for the land I was from — am from, and honestly I love it still even though I haven’t lived there for any of my adulthood — and even then, I was no stranger to moving when I wanted to stay. So I suppose I always saw the rural abandonment as involuntary, rather than evidence of choosing cities as somehow emblematic of a better life.
Disorderly reclamation of the commons: I feel like this will emerge from parts of our current life often thought of as marginal, from intentional or unintentional refugia, if you will. It might include things like guerilla gardening, or a refusal to work for wages when one could work for food directly instead. It might involve alternative currencies (probably not digital ones), or even just using cash more in a world of traceable contactless payments. I am reminded of Margaret Killjoy’s framing of “prepping” as having three aspects: gear, skills and relationships, and of relationships being the most important of these… I tend to enjoy learning new skills and I am a gadget person if there ever was one, while relationships are harder to pin down, but perhaps what we can do now to enable a disorderly reclamation of the commons is simply to build relationships by acting in solidarity with those who are currently experiencing the brunt of exploitation where we are. And if we can’t do that in “above the board” ways that are sanctioned by official channels, then perhaps we need to just do it anyway.
One of the biggest challenges to that “just do it anyway” approach is that state surveillance is easier to carry out now than ever before… but perhaps one driver of a move to more rural settings could be that it’s difficult to surveil rural areas to the same density as cities are now surveilled. It’s important not to fall into bunker thinking (“If I have a cabin in the woods nobody else needs to even know it’s there, so I can do whatever I want regarding building a rocket mass heater” is not a way to have good relationships with your neighbours, as far as I can tell), though, so moving to the countryside to escape the surveillance in the city will require, like every other part of this transition, slow and patient work, rather than being a quick fix for a presenting problem.
Regarding Tom Murphy’s blog, you should be able to put https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ into any RSS feed reader and it will pick up new entries. I use a Dreamwidth account for my RSS feed needs, because I am posting and reading there anyway, but there are several RSS-to-email tools out there, some of them free. I can’t vouch for how janky or reliable any of them are.
Even though I haven’t got a copy yet, I’ve started watching the book club of ‘Wild Service’ on YouTube, the book that’s emerged from the Right to Roam movement. I think it has a strong relationship to ‘the disorderly reclamation of the commons.
@Kathryn
“I wonder if some of the defensiveness you encounter when you suggest that perhaps increasing urbanisation is not the best way forward (or even a possible way forward) is due to a similar feeling of “well, this is what I’m stuck with, got to make the best of it” — people trying to extrapolate from what you are saying about the general trajectory to what they personally should do, realising that the ideal rural life is impossible for them, and trying to soothe the resulting dissonance by shooting the messenger.”
When I try and have tentative conversations with friends about some of the stuff we discuss here, the commonest response I get is anger!!!!!!!
People just don’t want to know. When I point out the limitations of renewables, people shut down.
The consequences of degrowth are beyond what most of my friends want to consider.
So I don’t have the conversation any more.
I think the ecomodernists push back and messenger shooting is coming from the same emotional place.
How many levels of grief do we all have to go through before we reach acceptance???
Things that help me:
– Talking about what I am doing and the advantages that my approach has even now, rather than how enmeshed in modernity we all are and how drastic the changes might be.
– Framing my concerns, if I discuss them at all, as statements about how I feel, rather than as broad truth claims. “I feel concerned that the consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels at the current rate will be pretty dire.” “I feel like the current food system is kindof broken, there must be a way to feed everyone good fresh food and also pay farmers properly and also protect the environment.” “I feel better when I take a belt-and-braces approach and have some food in my cupboards just in case there’s more supply chain difficulty in future.” “Well, I can’t predict the future, but I like knowing that if there’s another pandemic or whatever around the corner, at least I’ll have potatoes.”
– Not worrying about convincing anyone I’m right.
– Being clear that I could be wrong and I don’t know exactly what the future holds.
But really: I’m not trying to convince anyone in my offline life that degrowth has to happen, and this is probably why I don’t get into shouting matches with them. I’m trying to make sure they know who to go to if (or when) they decide it’s time to grow some food, instead of buying all of it from the supermarket. I’m trying to make sure they know that fresh local food tastes better. I’m trying to make sure they know it’s possible to exist without a car.
I suppose it also helps that I sit somewhat lightly to the idea that I will someday die and I have relatively little control over the manner and nature of that death. And that’s a direct result of my faith, which can be interpreted in a number of ways but is pretty firm on the concept that death does not have the last word. I see it as an ending of sorts, but also a transformation. Don’t get me wrong, here: I’d very much like to avoid dying prematurely if I can, and I don’t actually do very well at living each day as if it were my last, and I’m pretty sure that when the time comes I will not “go gentle into that dark night” but instead will bargain and prevaricate and rage and all the rest of it; I’m only human. But I do see my life, my existence if you will, as provisional, contingent on many factors, rather than guaranteed. I try to make major decisions with that provisionality in mind.
The thing I most regularly encounter anger about is my continued diligence in wearing a mask indoors when not at home, to protect myself from airborne illness. People really don’t like the visual reminder that they have chosen to accept a level of risk which they were previously uncomfortable with, or that they’ve been put into the position of having to make such a choice.
@Kathryn
My antics with rocket stoves, biochar retorts and composting toilets amuses and bewilders my friends.
They ask “but why?”
But if I tell the “why”, I know that they aren’t going to like it. So I just smile and carry on.
(I think with the biochar, they think I see a possible financial reward for making it)
Non of it may become relevant in my lifetime anyway. But it’s good to show my kids other ways of thinking and I will explain the “why” when they are a bit older and the wheels start coming off of modernity.
So……I have those conversations in places like here, where we all get the basics, even if we differe on some of the details.
Keeps me sane. 🙂
@Kathryn
I see the “loss” of modernity as a kind of grief. A process of mixed emotions leading to acceptance.
Anger being one of the first ones.
(I can remember being generally very cross, for quite a while, when my Dad died.)
There are going to be a lot of cross people out there as their material worlds start to faulter.
Thanks Kathryn, this is really good advice about the framing of “I feel like…”, and the aim being not to convince people but to let them know they can discuss this stuff with you if they come to that conclusion themselves. I’ll use this in future.
John, I tend to try and spin the “fun” aspect of this stuff. It’s fun to do allotmenting, see how much of my own food I can get, fun to see what I can do for myself, etc.
@Ben Johnson
I’m having lots of fun playing with all this stuff.
It’s just that I can’t/shouldn’t explain the reasoning behind it.
Not for now, anyway!!!!!!!!
@John
Yes, grief for the good things of modernity is certainly part of it.
But my grief has to be proportionate, and the reality is that many of the “good” things I have in modernity are only granted to me by exploiting others. This perspective does temper my grief to some extent.
Try to imagine living a life where no product you use is produced by people who are underpaid for their labour, endangered by their labour, or compelled to labour far from their family or home. Try to live a life where no thing you use causes pollution or habitat destruction in its production. It’s probably about as hard as living a life free from the products of fossil fuels.
This is not to say that pre-modern civilisations were free of such exploitation, or that modernity has brought no absolute goods for humanity or the more than human world. But for me, part of welcoming a different system is being more aware of some of the costs of the one I’m mostly stuck in now.
Pointing out these costs to people is probably not going to go well unless they already want to change, though. Otherwise, it just comes across as scolding people for doing the best they can to get by.
@Kathryn
I’ve flipped it in my head for a while now.
I’m one of the lucky beneficiaries of modernity, so I’m going to appreciate the opportunities that it gives me.
I sit in wonder as I get in my van and it takes me places with such ease.
Or flick a switch and a room lights up.
Or get in an aeroplane (not that I’ve done that for a while)
I’m lucky to be born in a time and place that gives me access to all these wonders.
These things, like life itself, will come to an end, so I’m going to appreciate them whilst I can.
I look at a lot of people around me who have all the same benefits but seems to still not be happy.
@John
That also works!
@Chris
The line that jumped out at me from the Tom Murphy piece was…..
Refering to renewables……
“Even an unprecedented, fantasy-level 90% end-to-end recovery results in less than half the original resource after just 7 cycles, and less than 10% after 22 cycles. It’s not indefinite.”
And that life on earth is a 100% material recycling system (apart from the energy from the sun)
I’ve got Do The Math bookmarked and check in ever now and the.
Bit like here. I don’t get notifications of new content here. I just have to check in and see what’s new.
Marshall Rosenberg, in Non-violent Communication, characterises anger as the tragic expression of an unmet need.
This post met with some interesting pushback over on Resilience, but even more interesting and relevant to the discussion here is Gunnar’s latest post at Garden Earth:
https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/what-matters
Reading the push back on Resilience from our friend Joe and company, I felt some deliberate obtuseness, as if wood and cob, wells and composting toilets and reed beds can be compared to steel and concrete and plastic sewerage systems and industrial water systems. Cost, as they say, is indivisible from energy, so the rural life and its provisioning costs less. If we can’t have some latitude, within these discussions, it gets a bit tedious to have to try and say everything – another illusion in itself.
@Simon H
Do you have a link to the Resilience piece?
Thanks for a really good summation of the key issues to be considered in transitioning from unsustainable megalopolises to more liveable and survivable forms of human connection, Chris.
As far as I am concerned, the argument is not IF the eco-modernists (and anyone else relying on technologies profitable to capitalist investors) to ‘save’ the so-called ‘us’ (I call them ‘the flying class’, which is less than 15% of the world’s population) will be proven wrong, but WHEN.
That’s not a question anyone can answer, because there are so many variables in play. But as the advice for avoiding scams goes: ‘If a thing looks too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.’ Food from vats, air-conditioning for all, answers to life’s deep questions from AI – all too false to be good.
So if the question of IF is not relevant, and we can’t answer the WHEN, the next question, it seems to me, is HOW. That’s nearly as hard as when, but the information Chris shared above on how one does sustainable local scale energy from wood versus unsustainable industrial scale is the sort of information that many more people need to know. Otherwise they will keep thinking it is impossible, when (as Bruce says) managing one’s own wood supply and increasing biodiversity at the same time is some of the most useful work one can do to secure a better present as well as future.
I just discovered Alice Friedemann, author of Life After Fossil Fuels. She describes a ‘wood world’ resembling the forest based economy of the 14th century, where wood is the primary material of infrastructure – the steel and concrete of our present era.
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/life-after-fossil-fuels?utm_source=publication-search&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
I have a book of cracker recipes by her!
(I should make more crackers, now that I’ve found a source of stoneground flour that I like. Or grow some more of my own….)
Brixton Windmill does a stoneground flour, I worked there as a Miller and helped sharpen the millstones.
Good to know!
I really want a quern of my own, but space is something of an issue (and I already have an electric mill).
(And now I want to write “A Quern of One’s Own”, a futuristic polemic about anti-capitalist food sovereignty and the tensions between individualist and communalist responses… in my copious spare time!)
@Joel
I’ve mentioned it before but have you read.
Just Enough by Azby Brown?
A relook at Edo Japan.
Wood being the primary construction material.
Goes into detail of the forestry techniques and how housing was modulised. Wall panels, timber lengths etc were a standard size.
Worth a read.
@Christine Dann
This blog has some of the answers to “When”.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/09/17/289-project-2050-part-one/
Chris wrote: “I’ve raised more questions here than answers about the relative merits of the urban and the rural. If other people would care to dig into them in good faith and careful detail, I’ll look with interest at what they come up with.”
Here are some of the related urban/rural studies I’ve found online. (Also, a couple papers related to the energy transition as a “super wicked problem”, and the energy-related justice issues at stake).
~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. UK study, rural and urban per capita footprints about the same, but urban “overshoot ratio” is much higher.
“In the present study, the environmental footprints of the Borough of Swindon and the County of Wiltshire in Southern England have been evaluated and contrasted. Swindon is largely an urban area, whereas the adjacent landscape of Wiltshire is predominantly rural in nature…
“These calculations show that, on a per capita basis, the footprints of the two neighbouring communities studied are roughly the same: 5.65–5.94 global hectares (gha)… However, the corresponding overshoot ratios [presumably the ratio of ecological footprint to biocapacity] for Swindon and Wiltshire were found to be 10.35:1 and only 2.01:1, respectively.”
Footprints on the landscape: An environmental appraisal of urban and rural living in the developed world
Eaton et al., 2007
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169204607001405
~~~~~~~~~~~~
2. Study of energy consumption in 136 countries finds a “narrow gap between urban and rural energy use in the residential sector”, although “urbanization has been identified as a major contributor to the increase in [Residential Energy Consumption] REC in several case studies”.
“Surprisingly, for highly urbanized regions, including the developed regions of the world, Latin America & the Caribbean, and the developing regions in Europe & Central Asia, the urbanization impact seemingly becomes nonsignificant because of the narrow gap between urban and rural energy use in the residential sector…”
“Although urbanization has been identified as a major contributor to the increase in [Residential Energy Consumption] REC in several case studies [[43], [44], [45], [46], [47]], there remains a significant knowledge gap in how urbanization can affect REC globally.”
Does urbanization lead to less residential energy consumption? A comparative study of 136 countries
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544220308720
~~~~~~~~~~~~
3. Rural-to-urban migration was found to increase household greenhouse-gas footprints.
“Counterintuitively, urbanization increased HGFs [household greenhouse-gas footprints] in emerging regions, resulting in a >1% increase in China, Indonesia, India and Mexico over the period, due to large migrations of people moving from rural to urban areas.”
A global overview of developments of urban and rural household GHG footprints from 2005 to 2015
Yuan et al., 2022
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969721057739
~~~~~~~~~~~~
4. In developing countries, the per-capita climate footprints for urban residents were found to be much larger than for rural residents.
“We show that there are large inequalities between urban and rural areas in developing countries. The average per capita CF [climate footprint] in urban areas tends to be larger than that of rural inhabitants ranging from twice as large to nine times larger. We find that electricity consumption and transport are the largest contributors to the total CF in all expenditre groups.”
Urban and rural carbon footprints in developing countries
Connolly et al., 2022
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac7c2a/meta
~~~~~~~~~~~~
5. Despite the expectation that increased population density in megacities would result in less CO2 emissions per capita, the population density was found to be insignificant, so it was dropped from further consideration in this study.
“Population density was insignificant in all estimated models, despite a negative association between carbon dioxide emissions and population density that has been reported in the literature [49]. So, population density was dropped from further consideration, thinking that some of the urban sprawl effects would be picked up by the ecological footprint.”
A Regression Analysis of the Carbon Footprint of Megacities
Paravantis, et al., 2021
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/3/1379
~~~~~~~~~~~~
6. “Urban areas are home to about 54% of total global population and account for more than 70% of global energy use (IPCC 2014, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division 2015).”
Carbon footprints of 13 000 cities
Moran et al., 2018
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aac72a/meta
~~~~~~~~~~~~
7. Study found no direct impact of total urban density on per capita energy consumption, despite the “popular view” that “increasing density will result in a reduction in energy consumption”.
“A popular view suggests that there is a strong negative correlation between urban density and energy consumption. This implies that increasing density will result in a reduction in energy consumption… this research [paper] crystallizes some of the relationships between density and energy consumption in western cities. The method is applied on Newman and Kenworthy’s data, leading to the conclusion that there is no direct impact of total urban density.”
Urban density and energy consumption: a new look at old statistics
Mindali et al., 2004
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0965856403000946
~~~~~~~~~~~~
8. “In many developing countries, urban dwellers use substantially more energy than their rural compatriots”, while the available data indicates that “urban energy use in high-income countries is not substantially different from national averages using a consumption-based accounting approach that also includes energy embodied in imports.”
“18.6.2 Urban Energy Use [page 1386]”
“In many developing countries, urban dwellers use substantially more energy than their rural compatriots, which primarily reflects higher urban incomes. Conversely, in many industrialized countries per capita urban final energy use (i.e., based on a production-accounting approach) is often substantially lower than the national average, which reflects the effects of compact urban form, settlement types (multi- versus single-family dwellings) and availability and/or practicability of public transport infrastructure systems compared with those in the suburban or rural sprawl. The few available data, however, suggest that urban energy use in high-income countries is not substantially different from national averages using a consumption-based accounting approach that also includes energy embodied in imports. So, the effects of lowered direct final energy use through a more service-oriented urban economy, urban form and density, and resulting lower transport energy use are largely compensated by higher embodied energy use associated with higher urban incomes in high-income countries. For low-income countries, available data are too sparse to allow a similar comparison. However, it is highly likely that, because of the much higher income differential between urban and rural populations in low-income countries, their urban energy use is significantly higher on a per capita basis compared to national averages in a consumption-based accounting framework as well.”
Urban Energy Systems
Grubler, et al. 2012
https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/10067/1/GEA%20Chapter%2018%20Urban%20Energy%20Systems.pdf
~~~~~~~~~~~~
9. An interesting snippet (from a book I didn’t read) says that their results correct “the [incorrect] popular assumption that the denser, central city areas are more energy-wise.”
“About the cover image: overall household energy requirement in Greater Sydney and surrounding local government areas… It corrects the popular assumption that the denser, central city areas are more energy-wise.” (page iv)
Urban Energy Transitions, From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Power
Droege, editor. 2008
https://books.google.com/books?id=0bEecvixZRMC&lpg=PP1&ots=vQMieNQBfj&dq=rural%20urban%20energy%20footprint&lr&pg=PR3#v=onepage&q=corrects&f=false
~~~~~~~~~~~~
10. Results of this recent study indicate that large cities can act as heat sources during heatwaves, propagating heat to other areas. “Megacities are causal pacemakers of extreme heatwaves.”
“Similar patterns can be observed in other extreme heatwaves (See Supplementary Figures 12 and 14), signifying that large cities are more conducive to heat propagation to other (ambient and distant) areas and act as heat sources during these events. Interestingly, the results in Fig. 6b indicate positive correlation between the causality and population totals during many (10 out 12) heatwaves (See Supplementary Figure 13)… Our study also unravels a positive relationship between the population and causality during heatwaves. This is likely due to the concentrated population and the associated extensive anthropogenic emissions of waste heat and greenhouse gases…”
Yang, X., Wang, ZH., Wang, C. et al. Megacities are causal pacemakers of extreme heatwaves. npj Urban Sustain 4, 8 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-024-00148-x
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-024-00148-x
~~~~~~~~~~~~
11. This paper describes how the energy transition is a “super wicked problem” which “requires solving a large number of [multidisciplinary] sub-problems” and could be threatened by “complexity catastrophe”.
“The main contemporary challenge involves such an energy sector transformation which will prevent climate change and will ensure the sustainable development of the global economy. However, this requires solving a large number of sub-problems in areas such as legislation, energy distribution, democracy, and cybersecurity. Therefore, this is a multidisciplinary issue. Moreover, the situation is complicated by the frequently omitted fact that energy transition is not part of the standard capitalism model, extensively described in handbooks and scientific literature, but it is conducted as part of a new economic system—prosumer capitalism, which has not been properly explored yet. However, a solution to this super wicked problem has to be found soon, as the energy system may be threatened with complexity catastrophe, which denotes exceeding the upper complexity limit associated with the breakdown of its adaptability.”
The Energy Transition as a Super Wicked Problem: The Energy Sector in the Era of Prosumer Capitalism
by Aleksander Jakimowicz
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/23/9109
~~~~~~~~~~~~
12. This paper talks about the “techno-optimist outlook”, the underlying systemic issues which remain unquestioned in the dominant discourse, and the energy related justice issues at stake. “The ones who have lost in the ‘old’ fossil-based system are likely to lose again in the ‘new’ low-carbon economy…”
“The energy transition, propagated as the flagship solution to climate change, is far more complex than replacing fossil energy with renewable energy. It is ambiguous, uncertain and often poorly understood or narrowly framed. In this sense, the energy transition resembles a ‘wicked problem’…
“Analyzing the ‘just transition’ discourse, the epistemological hegemony of the Global North becomes evident in the framing of the ‘climate problem’ and the resulting solutions (Alarcón et al., 2022). A techno-optimist outlook and the assumption of ‘win-win’ situations for all stakeholders is characteristic of this dominant discourse. It reduces ‘just transition’ to a technocratic, reformist and reactive exercise. The underlying systemic issues, such as the economic growth paradigm, remain unquestioned. In these approaches, justice is measured by the equivalence between jobs created in low-carbon technologies and those lost in declining carbon-intensive industries. This discourse silences the voices of potential ‘losers’ beyond job losses and fails to address the environmental, climate and energy related justice issues at stake. The ones who have lost in the ‘old’ fossil-based system are likely to lose again in the ‘new’ low-carbon economy: the marginalization of Black, Indigenous, rural and peasant communities is possibly exacerbated and the participation of the non-landowning population in decision-making processes undermined.”
The discursive blinkers of climate change: Energy transition as a wicked problem
Julia Schwab
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214790X23001090
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here’s an additional reference, number 13 for my list above.
“By contrast, this chapter argues that such a rosy, technologically enhanced, mainly urban future is by no means assured. Cities, particularly megacities, are increasingly vulnerable to climate disruption, energy scarcity and resultant geopolitical instability. It is conceivable that the era of urbanization will end ignominiously before the end of the century.”
Megacities at risk: the climate-energy conundrum
by William E. Rees, former Director and Professor Emeritus of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning in Vancouver, Canada
Published as Chapter 20 of the book:
Handbook of Megacities and Megacity-Regions
Danielle Labbé, André Sorensen
Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020
Most of the chapter can be read here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=TGv8DwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA292#v=onepage&q&f=false
Steve L
I’m not sure if this thread is still active, so I may repost this in the next topic too.
Many thanks for this reference list! I’ve gotten my hands on almost all of these now and made my way through the majority of them. These references provide some excellent data on the urban vs. rural question.
I’ll offer one more up in turn that I have found to be excellent. This one is not directly focused on urban vs rural, but instead looks at the fundamental science and long term history (thousands of years) of agriculture. Brown’s work speaks to urban sustainability in terms of impacts on nutrient and organic material flows.
A. Duncan Brown (2003), Feed or Feedback : Agriculture, Population Dynamics and the State of the Planet
Thanks for the recommendation of “Feed or Feedback”. It looks like an interesting book, especially Part III (“Where To From Here?” and “The Real World?”).
A book review of “Feed or Feedback” from the journal Biology and Environment:
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/423/article/809871/summary
Thanks for that @T Hill & Steve. It’s good, if sobering, to see credible academic critiques of the urban-industrial metabolism like these. I’ll be sure to come back to this issue in due course (if the world allows!) and will try to take a look at Brown’s book.
Kasia Paprocki’s other paper, ‘The climate change of your desires: Climate migration and imaginaries of urban and rural climate futures’, has a relationship to this post. Where she outlines how the idea and imaginary of an urban climate resilient future necessarily destroys the idea, or imaginary of a rural one.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775819892600
More comments – thank you. Another brief response:
– Regarding the pushback on Resilience, for various reasons I’m basically not reading comments on my writing anywhere any more except here on my website. But, along the lines of Joel’s comment, I’m interested to hear from commenters here who do read other comments if they come across any critical points of substance that they think it’s worth my while pondering. Sounds like from what Joel says maybe not in this instance?
– Many thanks Steve for assembling that fascinating compendium of studies. Might say a little more about that in my next post.
– Good point from John via Tom Murphy about how even a 90% recycling rate isn’t a good long-term bet. I hadn’t really thought about that. Just goes to show how our modern short-term perspective can bamboozle us.
– Interesting comments about the end of modernity as grief and anger – two often closely related feelings. It’s of course true that people often can’t do much to change their grounding in the belly of the beast because of structural obstacles. Why they might feel angry in the face of criticisms of the beast is an interesting question. So is how to remove the structural obstacles. I think it’s important to see the long-term historical violence involved in modernity. Not something really to be grieved, but it can be hard for those of us who in many ways have been its luckiest beneficiaries to let go.
– Relatedly, a whole interesting debate prompted by Christine in terms of the ‘how’ of transition from modernity. To which I don’t think there are any single answers, but many local and contextual ones. I’m interested to discuss this more.
– Relatedly, too, another whole interesting debate prompted by Kathryn about the disorderly unravelling of modernity. I’m also interested to discuss this more. Things like the modern surveillance state are potential game-changers that maybe I haven’t paid enough attention to. On the other hand, I think it’s possible to over-emphasise the means at states’ disposal to command at the expense of their ability to command in terms of political legitimacy, a mysterious quality that can be quite unruly in its relationship to technology.
– Disclosure: Kasia Paprocki is my son Jake’s PhD supervisor, so I get to hear a bit about her work, which I find very interesting – although I have no direct interaction with her. Jake is researching climate, migration and urbanism in Bangladesh, and was in Dhaka during the recent political upheaval there, which has also been very interesting and relevant to the preceding point about political legitimacy. Greg Reynolds suggested I might publish a guest post from Jake here, and that’s in the pipeline.
It seems to me it’s basically the ‘weight of numbers’ that Joe is pointing to – the possibly impossible headache of retrofitting countrysides to rehouse the world’s forward-thinking city slackers. I often think Joe’s role is for sounding the alarm in a well-meaning way to encourage as many who are able or pondering it, to get out of the ghetto now, before it gets much darker. I seem to remember his own children live in cities.
Yes, that is exactly my intent.
My children are ‘freeloaders’. They like their professional careers in the city and want keep them, but they know that if they can always go back to the little farm they grew up on if necessary.
Some years ago my son and I discussed when a return would be warranted. My suggestion was to come back if he lost his job and couldn’t get another one that would support him or if civil unrest was so continuously bad that he didn’t feel safe in the city (he lives in Portland, Oregon).
This brings up another aspect of small farms that people should consider. Small farms are going to be like lifeboats, when the modernity ship goes down there will be refugees from all over hoping to climb aboard. I expect to welcome as many as possible, turning a small farm into an eco-village, but the potential for desperation turning into conflict will always be there.
Nice to hear from you, Joe, and I hope I didn’t cause any offence… My son, 8, (that’s not his name, he’s called “Erik with a k” mostly:) bought six chickens last weekend and I’ve been revving him up about chicken tractors. I’m pleased they are both (his older sister is donkey mad at the mo’) interested in rural life and livestock (he’s also become super-keen on the idea of hunting since the stags have started audibly rutting at night). We may be moving into eggs as a farm gate sale opening salvo. No doubt they’ll move away when the time comes, as generally happens, but I envisage a similar open-door policy as you have offered for your children. Must admit, one sometimes has to wonder how different things might be in 5, 10 years’ time. Back to today, surely somebody in the village is going to need the eggs?
Micro-refugia watch: on Tuesday, Year One will come to the Soup Garden to learn about growing food and help me harvest potatoes.
On the refugia front, don’t miss this Sunday’s On Your Farm, in Chris’s neck of the woods (Wells, Somerset)…
“For three generations, Rob Addicott’s family have always wanted their Somerset farm to be accessible and welcoming to the local community. When he met his wife Suzanne, who had a background in working with people with addiction and homelessness problems, they decided they wanted Manor Farm to do, and be more.
In collaboration with Connect Community Church in Wells, the old Dairy House was converted into the area’s only direct access homeless hostel. Rural homelessness is often a hidden problem in the countryside, and it can be hard to find and access support. Dairy House residents receive accommodation and wholistic support within 2,000 acres of farmland, woodland and orchards. It receives core funding from the local authority. They can also learn skills in growing, gardening, animal care and woodwork with partner project, Root Connections. Their produce is sold direct to the local community through veg boxes, and used for meals in the communal hostel kitchen.
In this programme, Marie Lennon meets Rob and Suzanne, as well as speaking to service users and hostel staff.”
@Simon H
That’s sounds interesting and very much in my neck of the woods as well.
Is it an open day or are you referencing a blog they run?
Ah! Now I get it!
BBC Radio 4.
Yes , exactly John – tomorrow (Sunday Sep 21) at 6.30am, or thereafter on iPlayer. I could have been clearer. The farm sounds like a particularly interesting place.
Chris wrote: “Why they might feel angry in the face of criticisms of the beast is an interesting question.”
That reminds me of the hostility and disparagement which Chris faced after writing “Saying NO…”
The chapter from William Rees (which I linked above) includes this quote: “Whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” Thus, when the illusions and delusions underpinning someone’s sense of well-being are being threatened by truth tellers, they attack the truth tellers.
Here’s the full quote, written in 1895 and translated from French (my online translator says that illusions and delusions are synonymous in French):
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
Gustave Le Bon
Psychologie des Foules [The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind] (1895)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon
Disorderliness:
I typed a long list of the unintentional successes of my gardening and foraging year, so far, which range from “maybe the kiwi vine I found in the park will actually ripen its fruit” to “I accidentally grew a totally new bean variety, maybe” via “that really is a lot more oilseed pumpkins than I expected, but it turned out to be a serendipitous circumstance”.
What they have in common, along with their unintentionality, is an attentiveness to things as they are rather than as I expect them to be, and openness to things not proceeding according to plan. The latter, if I’m honest, is really due to always planning and starting just a little more than I can manage, so that attrition sets in and what thrives in my gardens is what can deal with a certain amount of benign neglect. My gardens are disorderly; my foraging is opportunistic.
There is something about the philosophy of modernity, and I think also about eco-modernism, that loves straight lines, lists of numbers that all add up, balance sheets, efficiency. I can understand this to an extent: I’d love to know why my garlic crop failed this year and what the exact steps are that I must take to prevent the same thing next year. (I have some ideas about it, too, but it boils down to “too much spring rain” which is not, in fact, within my gift to change). I can see why industrial monocrop cereal farmers want to test their soil and then put in the exact amount of amendment required for their chosen cash crop, no more and no less. There is an impulse to look at the hours I put into the community garden (which I do actually track, so I can get paid), and the produce that comes out, and try to justify one with the other.
But even the community garden has been yielding plenty of chard that I had no part in planting for two months now and looks like it will continue to do so into winter. A plant across the lot that I think is from the same parent grew over last winter and set seed this summer, so I’ve been saving that and spreading it around some. (Meanwhile, some of the other chard that I sowed on purpose just didn’t make it through the summer heat.)
Modernism imposes order in the name of efficiency in order to guarantee sufficiency, but expends huge amounts of energy in doing so. Meanwhile, allowing some room for chaos — which will mean losses as well as gains — leads to abundance. Sometimes the abundance is of produce. Sometimes the abundance is of, er, learning experiences.
I don’t quite know what that means about a disorderly unravelling of modernity, but I think what I am getting at is that it probably needs to be closer to a somewhat weedy allotment than to One Grand (Taylorist?) Plan. Chaos and attrition are harder to relate to, maybe, and certainly harder to direct. But modernity will unravel itself with or without our help; my original comment about disorderliness wasn’t about disorderly unravelling, but a disorderly reclamation of the commons.
A gardener would walk into any one of my growing sites and instantly recognise that someone is intentionally growing food there. I don’t do as much weeding as some of my plot neighbours would like, but I do some. I don’t always plan everything, but I do start with some kind of idea of what I intend to grow where, and then modify that based on what actually happens. Sometimes that means making multiple sowings of the same thing because conditions are poor, and sometimes it means eating a lot of chard. (Or chickweed, tree spinach, rocket or mustard… I am not short of self-seeding greens.)
If what comes next is made up of the ideas that are lying around (like chard in the soil seed bank) then maybe the best thing we can do is try out lots of ideas and learn to be comfortable with the chaotic abundance that happens when we have less power to impose order. Maybe we need to observe local conditions and then broadcast some seeds.
I’m basically not reading comments on my writing anywhere any more except here on my website.
I think that’s very wise …
sputnikglobe.com/20240913/greed-new-form-of-religion-or-compliance-test-why-are-britons-forced-to-eat-bugs-1120134643.html
Taking the pensions to subsidise bugs .
One of the directors at the Remakery where Alice works is very excited about ‘green corridors’ , it has become a kind hearted running joke. Tonight I heard him say that the city of Medilin had managed to reduce its temperature by 2 degrees through the use of green corridors. Like Kathryn says, cities will persist but it will be through – their ruralisation. It feels like the dichotomy is false – and the academic literature seems to bear this out – but that falsifying of urban living as better necessitates the destruction of the rural. We need to repopulate the countryside and ruralise the city.
This cannot be on urban terms; steel, concrete, centralised energy, water and transport systems. It necessitates the creative destruction of those infrastructures with their domestic local low impact alternatives. The attendant motorways of this defunct system can be the green corridors, rewilded, wildlife corridors of the landscape.
Medillin:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230922-how-medellin-is-beating-the-heat-with-green-corridors
https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1837129533947867555?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1837129533947867555%7Ctwgr%5Eac146986f683cc88edfa8900aca3f21337d34746%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fweather%2Fmsm-journos-inadvertently-reveal-shocking-truth-about-global-warming
Yes. The planet has been hotter than it is now.
Mapping time scales in millions of years isn’t that useful when considering humans.
The Holocene is 10,000 years. It wouldn’t show up in a graph of that scale.
Before then, agricultural (and all that has gone along with it) wasn’t possible due to fluctuating temperatures.
Agreed , the point being earth’s temperature has varied over time , I just think what the news papers ( if they were around ) would be saying about the ending of the last ice age and Dogger land flooding . Perhaps our eating of wooly mammoth and the conected fires cooking it would be blamed .
Another brief follow-up.
To John’s point about the material wonders of modernity “I look at a lot of people around me who have all the same benefits but seems to still not be happy” I think an interesting debate could be had about whether to insert a ‘despite’ or a ‘because’ in there.
Hear hear to Kathryn’s points about disorderliness and straight lines. Hence the problem I have when people want me to say how to ‘solve’ the problems of modernity that I identify. Wrong question, wrong framing, falls precisely into the modernist mindset.
Another key point from Kathryn: “it just comes across as scolding people for doing the best they can to get by”. Agreed, but that sort of implies a degree of buy-in or house-training to the ultimate promise of modernity. So the question is how to get beyond that to other possibilities. Not blaming people for the complicities with business-as-usual that we all have, but seeking shared grounds to transcend BAU.
I’m less persuaded by the ‘I feel like…’ framing, as critiqued by Marshall Rosenberg of non-violent communication fame. A feeling is an emotion, with no ‘like’ attached. “I feel angry/sad/frightened” etc. Whereas “I feel like…” is a more roundabout way of saying “I think…”
Thanks Steve for that Le Bon quote. I guess it bears on Kathryn’s ‘scolding’ point. I agree with it, though I wouldn’t want to align myself too closely with Le Bon in general! A problem these days is that most people are thoroughly alienated from the production of food & material livelihood, but keenly aware of nature destruction – seems like they just want the question of food & material livelihood to go away and get solved technically somehow so that nature can be saved. But this is fundamentally problematic and won’t lead to the outcome they want. So, yeah, we get back to shooting the messenger…
Interesting podcast here by Rachel Donald with Louis Arnoux: https://www.planetcritical.com/p/the-energy-collapse-louis-arnoux. Aligns with my recent critiques of renewable energy transition and over-urbanisation narratives from a more thermodynamic perspective.
And talking of podcasts, I did one with Jason Snyder going through my recent post about energy transition. I was already a bit rusty on some of the details when I did it with him. Goldfish brain! https://open.spotify.com/episode/5yoeRpvxu2Mf2vfVh5bHkt?si=nXyJdTW7RM-nZ3beqP-seg&nd=1&dlsi=9eec92f64eaa4ce8
I agree that “I feel like” is a more roundabout way of saying “I think” — but as my goal is less about changing people’s minds and more about presenting what I’m doing without making them immediately shut down, roundabout is sometimes helpful….
Kris de Decker in No Tech Magazine has highlighted a study showing a net appropriation of labour by the rich North from the poor South.
https://www.notechmagazine.com/2024/09/unequal-exchange-of-labour-in-the-world-economy.html
Their approach is to look at embodied labour.
I wonder whether a similar approach might be relevant for urban-rural relations.
I also wonder whether resentment of the system that produces such stark divides gets misdirected at individuals or groups of individuals. People move to the city to look for work, only to find their costs are much higher and the work as intermittent as ever, and then find themselves lumped in with “rich City types” (or, much worse, some anti-Semitic dogwhistle phrases I won’t repeat here) in political rhetoric. This suits the actual rich very well indeed, but makes urban-rural solidarity that much harder.
Meanwhile, my father sent me a link to a small weeding robot, Tertill: https://tertill.com/pages/faqs
I’m amused. On the one hand, I think tools like this could potentially help people who are short of time grow a more food for themselves, and that’s important. And using it for a year or three or four, to get rid of the really annoying perennials — couch grass, brambles, bindweed, creeping cinquefoil — could be a handy thing. So if it’s relatively hardy and doesn’t break after four months in the outdoors (a big if, to be sure), and if it doesn’t harm wildlife (the FAQ doesn’t seem to address this), I might class it as “a better use of our remaining fossil fuels than many other modern toys”.
On the other hand, I love the self-seeded greens, and this would obliterate them. I direct seed quite a lot of my plants, because it really does seem to make a big difference with some, and that would be a big pain with this device. I am still using woodchips for a lot of my pathways, but gradually moving toward grass and other living groundcovers for more of them, which wouldn’t be compatible with this. I grow a fair number of things in raised beds (to avoid flooding) or under various types of netting, and I don’t think this is likely to be very compatible with either of those. I’m not allowed to enclose my allotment in a fence, even a four inch high one, so I wouldn’t necessarily have a way to make sure it didn’t take off and try to plough up the entire site, which I’m assuming would make me extremely unpopular with plot neighbours, the committee, and so on. And then there’s the flooding. Even in the back garden, I’d be concerned about whether it might make noise that could disturb the neighbours. So it’s hard to see how it would be practical for me… and if it isn’t practical for someone growing on my scale, it’s hard to see how it would really do the “allow more people to grow more of their own food” thing that I would be hopeful it could. So: future e-waste, in the way a good hoe is not.
Just saw this https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/21/planning-passports-that-automatically-approve-high-quality-new-homes-will-be-a-game-changer-says-keir-starmer
It seems the powers that be are doubling down on urbanisation as a cure to all that ails us. I actually find their insistence on ‘growth’ baffling – the growth they want has always appeared in exact proportion to the increase in available energy – if available energy is not actually
declining (yet) it’s certainly not growing (the UK has been importing an ever increasing proportion of it’s fossil fuels since 2005 and last month we imported more electricity from the continent than ever) so betting the house on energy intense urbanisation seems like a recipe for a fragile future
At least they are not building over more farm land .
@Chris, I listened to Donald’s podcast with Arnoux. While I think the first part made quite a lot of sense (even if I am not sure I could follow what he wanted to say with the observation of the entropy industrial civ increases), I found his “solution” towards the end as dubious tp say the least. He spoke a lot about mimic nature and decentralize power, which is fine, but then his technical solution involved concentrated solar power, batteries operating att 1000 degrees and heat pumps etc, which I can’t really find in “nature”.
The Fourth transition web site is also not very convincing, using the same kind of ecomodernist drivel as many other.
A couple of further points before posting my next piece…
Gunnar, yes I agree – his solar solution at the end sounded a bit shonky.
I forgot to thank those who updated me on the Resilience critiques. Appreciated. So only Joe (Clarkson), then? I’m familiar with that critique & where Joe is coming from, which is fair enough. I was just wondering if anybody has mounted a brilliant defence of mass urbanism on grounds I haven’t thought of … which definitely isn’t where Joe is coming from.
Agree with Kathryn that there are times to be roundabout and times to be direct. I usually get them wrong.
Thanks for the update Bruce. Little surprise there. More on the Labour Party in my next post.
Yeah, I know everyone has moved on, but I’m catching up after time away.
Some adds, if not mentioned in the comments:
A key point that I think should have been made is that in allow energy future, many more people will have to be directly involved in providing their own sustenance and shelter. A great many of those bureaucracy / knowledge worker jobs and complex societal overhead will be unaffordable, and food is inherently tied to the land, so dispersing people to connect with the food producing land precludes urban concentration.
While tangentially mentioned, rural food systems should require greatly reduced cold chain infrastructure that uses large amounts of energy- a win for rural. Someone has surely calculated the cold chain energy cost, it’s gotta be huge.
closing the nutrient cycle and sewerage in general- a big advantage to rural. Turns a problem into a solution to ending fossil based fertilizers.
In general, concentration of people and power requires layers of complexity, ( Tainter, Turchin, etc) which is a cost that dispersed more self reliant approaches don’t need.
and one more- This guy lives in CANADA and he’s worried about air conditioning? Spare me. We are a tropical species, billions live in the equatorial zone without AC, and BTW, we’ve lived for thousands of years without AC. Acclimatize, you privileged jerk.
OK! on to the next one. Keep chugging Chris, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
People have died of heat in Canada fairly recently, and not because they weren’t acclimatized but because there are actually limits to what the human body can endure. Cold winters don’t necessarily mean cool and comfortable summers. I don’t think the “acclimatize, you privileged jerk” line is a very productive avenue of discussion.
However, it’s true that urban density contributes to local heating in a way that rural living does not. Hands down the best way to avoid overheating is to live near as much greenery as possible. What does that look like in a heat event where berries are literally cooking on the plants, such as happened in parts of Canada in 2022? I don’t know. Probably substantial changes to the way houses are constructed, though. That isn’t going to happen overnight either.
Cities’ thermal mass, creating heat islands, can be a killer on hot days, but A/C doesn’t help in a holistic sense, though it might make the panic room more bearable as long as there’s no unforeseen power cut, in which case a cold hot water bottle and a handheld fan are worth a try. Under such extreme conditions, my panic room du jour would be a root cellar, though A/C appears to be taking off in rural areas as in urban ones, so I don’t see that you have to be especially priviliged to have it.
From what I’ve seen, A/C needs servicing and units in regular use (think shops running several fridges in summer) don’t have a very long shelf life, which could be catastrophic if A/C fails at an inopportune moment, like when it’s working hardest. And from what I’ve experienced, I’m beginning to suspect that the proliferation of A/C where I live is helping to propagate power outages on the hottest of days and the coldest of nights. The latter is when you need thermal mass, as even cast iron woodburners cool extremely rapidly once the fire burns down. As useful tiled stoves and rocket mass heaters will weigh in at around 1500kgs and rising, I doubt that too many of them make a good fit with high-rise apartment blocks, which if you consider Moldova at present, that is most unfortunate.
https://www.voanews.com/a/moldovans-brace-for-no-heating-no-light-when-russia-halts-gas-supplies-/7919547.html
Yeah, I was a bit harsh with the jerk comment, but the wider point is that we need to think long term when considering continued investment in our built infrastructure.
As Simon points out- technology wears out. Thermal mass of natural materials, much better consideration of natural energy flows will be needed in a low energy future. Do we really believe that we will continue to mine, refine, fabricate, transport and power AC and other modern conveniences for the next 100, 200, 1000 years?
It might seem extreme to worry about things 100 years from now, but the transition to low energy homes, other infrastructure will take that long, if at all possible. It would be a shame to continue applying the one time gift of easily accessed metals and energy to things that will only last decades. If we advocate for a redistributed populace of farmers, we need to also advocate for a rural infrastructure that is as little dependent on complex technology as possible.
Heat death is a real thing, “The Ministry for the Future” paints a horrifying but likely scenario that we are lucky hasn’t happened yet, but more AC is not the long term answer.
I guess if you get used to AC in your car or tractor cab, it might seem practically intuitive to adopt the same solution in the home, or vice versa.
I’m not sure when it was coined, but driving on a hot day with the car windows wound down is jokingly referred to as Russian air-con out here.
I absolutely agree we need to consider the suitability of our built infrastructure for variable temperatures, and that more AC is not a good long-term plan.
I think it’s true that in the current built environment combined with continued warming, people will die without AC, though. I believe this is true because it has already happened in rich Western countries in areas where AC was not previously necessary. We can split hairs over how hot it really needs to get before this happens, or how many people will actually die directly or indirectly, but the problem is here now, not a theoretical one for the future.
In London, if you can’t get yourself to a forest, one of the best places to be in a serious heat wave is one of those great big Victorian churches that are so difficult to heat in winter. In 2022 my church opened as a “cool space” during the worst parts of the heatwave, offering people who didn’t have indoor shelter, or only had poorly-ventilated rooms that were unbearably hot, a space that was shaded from the sun, with good airflow, and had water available. I usually just go for cold baths and spending as much time at the allotment or in the forest as I can, though the near allotment lacks much shade, but I have access to those amenities in a way that someone sleeping rough does not. (Though tents in Epping Forest are really not an uncommon sight these days.)
I’m not arguing that AC is a good long-term solution, because it clearly isn’t. I will say that we might need to employ some short-term solutions on our way to figuring out the long-term ones if we don’t want to be leaving people to die.
Thanks for this little AC side debate.
Steve’s reference to the Ministry of the Future is apposite. My sense of that book was that Robinson is basically saying we should forget adaptation & low-tech adjustments – lethal wet bulb temperatures mean that the only solutions are high tech. This is also what Cameron and Monbiot have been saying. But I agree with commenters here that high-tech solutionism like AC isn’t going to work either. So where does that leave us? Ultimately I think with adaptation & low-tech adjustment as best we can, and with population movements out of death zones which will happen in better or worse ways. The latter, I fear, but the former, I hope. Any further thoughts on this would be very welcome. They kind of feed into my present book project.
Not sure where this fits in but Axios has an article saying the climate isn’t likely to stabilize any time soon.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/03/global-energy-transition-targets-fossil-fuels
Regarding “lethal wet bulb temperatures mean that the only solutions are high tech…”
When something is presented to me a “the only solution”, I am skeptical, especially when the statement of the problem is uncertain.
A second opinion about the problem:
“Is a wet-bulb temperature of 35 ∘C the correct threshold for human survivability?”
Published 17 August 2023
Yi-Chuan Lu and David M Romps 2023 Environ. Res. Lett. 18 094021
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ace83c/meta
“A wet-bulb temperature of 35 ∘C is widely used as the threshold for human survivability, but the wet-bulb temperature is not a particularly accurate metric for human heat stress. For a person in the shade, a more accurate metric is the heat index, which is based on a model of human thermoregulation that accounts for metabolic heat, radiation, respiratory ventilation, and finite wind speeds. The heat index has two critical values: the highest heat index for which a healthy core temperature can be maintained and the highest heat index that is survivable. It is shown here that a wet-bulb temperature of 35 ∘C corresponds to conditions between these two critical values. For example, in a world warmer than pre-industrial by 10 ∘C, about 30% of the world’s population would be exposed once or more per year to a wet-bulb temperature above 35 ∘C, but the heat index reveals that less than 2% would be exposed to fatal conditions while over 60% would be exposed to conditions that would cause hyperthermia.”
Migration for less than 2% of the world’s human population seems like it would be more feasible than reliably providing AC to the heat islands (which could exacerbate the heat island problem, due to thermodynamics).