Urbs versus Ruralis
by Jason GodeskyOver a year ago, Toby Hemenway wrote an article for Permaculture Activist suggesting that in the case of a “crash,” the city may be a safer bet than the country, titled, “Urban vs. Rural Sustainability.” In response, In the Wake published a critique: “Deconstructing ‘Urban vs. Rural Sustainability’.” This debate was picked up by Ran Prieur, who commented, “I agree that Hemenway’s essay is flawed, but I keep plugging it because it’s still the best written argument that the city might be better than the country in the collapse. That’s an uncommon position that deserves more attention than it’s getting, with so many crashies taking for granted that urbanites will eat each other and cities will go extinct. I continue to believe that some urban areas will adapt, that the best cities will be preferable to many rural areas, and that cities will play a big role in the future of humanity, whether it makes sense ecologically or not.” Matt Savinar also added the In the Wake critique to his daily links, commenting, “I keep going back and forth on where I think it will be safer to be.” All in all, it seems a perfectly good time to offer my two cents on what I think of the city, the country, and how the two will fare in the context of collapse.
We have inherited a romantic vision of the farmer–a hard-working loner, tilling the soil to feed his family. He is mythologized in the American canon as a hero of rugged individualism and the liberty of self-sufficiency at the frontier. Thoreau and Emerson fixed that icon in American literature. Bush’s Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, even quoted a rancher in a lecture, claiming, “Farmers and ranchers are the original environmentalists. We more than anyone else want to preserve the tall grass for generations to follow.” That view sits well with that hero of American mythology, the Farmer. That is certainly the view that seems to pervade Hemenway’s piece as he begins to write of why he lived in the country for ten years. He writes:
We went a good way toward making that dream come true. The red clay of our former clearcut turned, in places, to chocolate loam, though I noticed that even as our trees matured I still seemed to be needing more wood chips from the electric company or manure from a stable two miles away. From the garden flowed a steady procession of fruit and vegetables, but I confess I tried to ignore how much well-water we were pumping once our rain catchment ran dry partway through Southern Oregon’s four-month dry season.
Though Hemenway is a permaculture advocate, and his garden was a permacultural one, his anecdotal account of his time in the country highlights some of the shortcomings of permaculture. From his own account, Hemenway never achieved sustainability. He writes of how long the trip to the grocery store was, of the lengths of wire he needed for necessary electricity, or the insufficient rainfall, all marking that even today, the land could not support permaculture on its own.
So, Hemenway tells us how he moved to Portland, where he was pleased to find himself surrounded once again by like-minded political activists, rather than the more conservative indviduals he had met in the country. He tells a story of sharing fruit with his neighbor, and leaves the impression that urban permacultural gardens would be sufficent to keep Portland alive.
This informal assessment of local resources has revised my mental landscape design. I don’t need to grow all my favorite trees, only the ones that my neighbors lack (I’m thinking Asian pears, persimmons, and some early and storage apples). My neighbor’s yards are my Zones Two and Three. Plus, Stacey and Troy on the next block have persuaded the owner of a vacant lot to let eight families create a community garden on the site. A local tree service will soon be dumping chips there for sheet mulch, and next year we’ll be awash in food.
Anthropologically, permaculture is a fancy name for a very old practice: horticulture. Like agriculture, horticulture is a type of cultivation. Unlike agriculture, however, horticulture is below the point of diminishing returns. Usually, this is some feature of the cultivation practice itself. For example, swidden horticulture–or “slash and burn”–involves cutting down the trees in a given area, and setting them on fire. In the rain forests, where all the nutrients are locked in the trees, this may be the only way to successfully cultivate. Slash-and-burn can be sustainable with the right population, and a slow enough cycle of new plots, but it is a very precarious balance. Once disrupted, slash-and-burn will wipe out the village that depends on it in short order. So, these villages keep their cultivation below the point of diminishing returns, because escalation is not feasible.
Many permacultural practices are taken directly from horticultural practices. Seedballs, for example, were used by the Iroquois. Permaculture enthusiasts often point out how much more productive permaculture is than agriculture and they are, to some extent, correct. Horticulture is far more efficient than agriculture–according to Marvin Harris’ calculations, it is the most efficient subsistence method available. That said, horticulture still has its capacity. One of those capacities, as Hemenway’s own account illustrates, is that not every location is suited for permaculture. Some don’t have enough rainfall; others may not have sufficient sunlight. Some methods require certain kinds of geographical formations–like mountains, hills, valleys, or rivers. All of these conspire to make horticulture an insufficient answer for 6.5 billion in the face of collapse.
That doesn’t mean that horticulture is an unsustainable approach on a smaller scale, of an individual like Hemenway, or a small community. As the In the Wake critique concluded of Hemenway’s obstacles:
These problems are all things can be solved by planning ahead if you are planning to move out into the country from the city. … And the same goes for planning your garden and land so that you can get enough water and manure without importing it. That’s a precondition for sustainability.
With an exuberance that seems typical of far too many permaculture enthusiasts, Hemenway simply multiples the efficiency of permaculture times the land available in Portland, and comes to the conclusion that the entire city could be fed. Such a naive analysis neglects all those areas that are unfit for permacultural use, for the various reasons mentoned above. Most cities could become much more sustainable than they are now by growing gardens, sharing food, and other measures–and as the pressure of collapse mounts, those will no doubt be among the first options people turn to–but there is an inescapable problem of density to consider.
Density of population is a function of density of nutrients and the ability to transport those nutrients. Everyone in a city must be fed a certain number of calories every day, and if those calories are not in the city, they must be transported there. Cities have very dense concentrations of population–far, far denser than could ever be provided within the city itself, because it comes down to photosynthesis. Only so much sunlight falls on a given area of land per unit of time, and thus, the amount of energy that land has from the sun per unit time is fixed. Plants convert some of that energy into sugars, which provide some of their energy to herbivores, which provide some of their energy to carnivores. At each trophic level, there is an enormous loss of energy. Humans occupy one of the highest trophic levels on earth. Even on strictly enforced vegetarian diets, it tooks a good deal of solar energy to feed a single person for a day. Multiply that times the nearly two million people who live in Portland and its suburbs, and you see energy requirements far beyond the solar budget of that typically overcast city.
Thus, Portland requires transportation. Like all cities, Portland is not self-sufficient. It requires the import of energy in the form of food from those areas that have it in surplus–that is, from the country. Without that import–that is, without transportation, international trade, and a national government–that is, in the case of collapse–Portland would quickly lose its ability to feed itself, even with permaculture gardens to soften the blow. The nature of the city is that of a parasite, utterly dependent for its survival on its surrounding hinterland. A permacultural city could soften this blow by providing some of its own food, and thus reducing the amount it must exploit from the hinterland, but robbing a man of only $500 instead of $1,000 does not make the act any less a robbery. Such is the nested, exploitative nature of hierarchy itself. The leader is a parasite who exploits the people to stay alive; the people crowd into cities around the leader that exploit the hinterland to stay alive; the empire made up of core cities exploits its colonies and periphery to stay alive. To maintain the city is to maintain hierarhcy and civilization itself.
We have been taught to run to the cities for protection. Instinctively, as social animals, we find protection in other people, and where will you find more “other people” than in the city? Here we come to another disturbing point in Hemenway’s narrative: his urban elitism, and his inability to separate out the fallacy of the “rugged individualist.” He writes:
Slowly a mild paranoia set in. I started to wonder whether, if the Big Crash came, I was really in the right place. We had the best garden for miles around, and everyone knew it. If law broke down, wasn’t there more than a chance that my next door neighbor, a gun-selling meth dealer and felon, might just shoot me for all that food? How about the right-wing fundamentalists past him, who shot Stellar’s jays for fun and clearcut their land when they suspected spotted owls lived there? Or the two feuding families beyond them—one had fired a pistol during an argument, and neither would give way when their cars met on the road.
Responding to this passage specifically, the In the Wake critique offers a sharp response:
My question is, are the police in the city any less likely to take that food from you by force, as “taxes” if there is a major shortage of food? And do you think that if you resisted them they would not harm you to get it? In New Orleans, police took food and water from starving refugees, and that emergency was really quite brief by comparison to a permanent collapse.
Who is a larger threat, one armed person, or a large, trained, organized and extremely well-armed group? And who are you more likely to win over to your side, a neighbour with whom you can share food, skills and tools? Or a large group of psychological conditioned people trained in allegiance to the state? And besides, armed neighbours are abundant in cities, too, and in a shortage almost anything can be used as a weapon.
Earlier, this was offered:
First of all, Hemenway describes difficulties he had with country living, including a lack of common ground with and conflicts between his neighbours, trouble getting enough water, manure and wood chips for his garden, and “watery beer”. These problems are all things can be solved by planning ahead if you are planning to move out into the country from the city. Don’t move to a place where you won’t get along with the neighbours, or where you feel threatened by them. Hemenway’s implication by generalization is that all rural people are uncultured and violent, which is simply not the case, but it is a common stereotype held by privileged suburbanites. I’m sure that in some rural places there are many people I wouldn’t get along with or would feel threatened by, and in some places there aren’t. (When I was biking across southern Saskatchewan I came across some of the nicest strangers I’ve ever met.) I’m also sure that the same goes for cities. It’s all a matter of choosing a place that works for you ahead of time. If you don’t do that, you can’t blame it on all rural people.
Obviously, besides a location where his permaculture project was not sustainable, Hemenway also erred in his inability to buck the “rugged individualist” part of the Farmer mythos. Humans depend on their communities for survival; Hemenway’s project failed as much for his failure to plan for building a community, as for his failure to plan for his material needs. That said, if cities are doomed to starvation without exploiting a hinterland to feed them, how likely is that hinterland to continue with an agricultural life? Short answer: not very.
Koetke’s “Final Empire” highlighted the importance of topsoil to life on earth, and then began recounting the devastating impact agriculture has had on that topsoil:
In 1988, the annual soil loss due to erosion was twenty-five billion tons and rising rapidly. Erosion means that soil moves off the land. An equally serious injury is that the soil’s fertility is exhausted in place. Soil exhaustion is happening in almost all places where civilization has spread. This is a literal killing of the planet by exhausting its fund of organic fertility that supports other biological life. Fact: since civilization invaded the Great Plains of North America one-half of the topsoil of that area has disappeared.
Plants, like any other organism, takes in nutrients, and excrete wastes. For plants, those are nutrients they take out of the soil, and waste they put into the soil. In nature, what one plant excretes as waste, another takes in as nutrients. They balance each other, and all of them thrive. But monoculture–planting whole fields of just one crop–sets fields of the same plant, all bleeding out the same nutrients, all dumping back in the same wastes. It is precsely the same effect as filling an empty room with people and sealing it completely off. Eventually, the entire room will be full of carbon dioxide, and there will be no more oxygen. Monoculture does to topsoil what locking yourself in a garage with your car engine running does to a human.
As that happened, we also invented ever more powerful petrochemical fertilizers to offset the death of the soil, giving the illusion that all was well. The Dust Bowl, though, arose because our innovation was outpaced by the devastation. We quickly got back on top of it, though, leading us to the current situation. In “The Oil We Eat,” Richard Manning dramatically illustrated how much our “breadbasket” now relies on oil when he wote:
Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.
Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp� remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers’ accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.
To refer to the “Fertile Crescent” today is a cruel joke, but this was not always the case. Once, this region was abundant. The arid desert we see today is the result of agriculture. In the first episode of Guns, Germs & Steel, a three-part documentary version of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, archaeologist Mohammed Najjar at the site of an ancient agriculturalist village in Jordan, looked out over the desert landscape and said:
People were destroying the environment. The waters had been over-exploited, the trees had been cut, and this is what when, when, when you, when you face the, the end, I mean you are facing the wall. You will end with landscape like that, mean with, with few trees, with no grass, and with less water. So what we are looking at today is the outcome of over-exploiting the environment.
It is a frightening thought: we made the deserts of the Fertile Crescent. The first farmers stripped it of all life, and then spread out to the east and west to consume the next region, like the alien invaders of some clichéd science fiction movie. They eventually reached the Great Plains. Beneath feet of fertilizers made from oil and natural gas, the soil is eroded and exhausted. When farmers first came to the New World, it was rich farmland. They farmed it, and bled it dry. We cannot go back to the agrarian life we once lived–the topsoil that life depended on was bled to death by that very agrarian life that we once lived. While some small pockets of arable land may remain, the amount of the world that can be farmed without fossil fuels is tiny–and in an age of global warming, tiny will shift to miniscule.
James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, argues in his new book, The Revenge of Gaia, that it is too late to stop global warming–we have passed the point of no return. He argues that a thin layer of aerosol from industrial pollution has caused global dimming, and has retarded global warming slightly. With the end of industrialism, that layer will quickly dissolve, causing rapid increases in temperature. Our cereal grain staples are tempermental crops, requiring very specific parameters of soil composition and climate. With the end of cheap oil, they will have neither.
Are we doomed, then? Hemenway and his critics consider only the two poles of the rural farmer and the city slicker–they neglect entirely the natural state of humanity, the hunter-gatherer. Topsoil dead to cereal grains are rich in other compounds that other plants flourish in. Humans evolved on African savannas, and are naturally disposed towards warmer temperatures than those most of us reside in now. Deserts where farmers starve are home to vibrant forager cultures. While a dry spell or a hot year can kill off farmers, foragers are transhumant omnivores among whom starvation is nearly unheard of–even in the Kalahari.
Which is safer, the city or the country? The country, obviously! The only way that you could make the wilderness dangerous is if you tried to farm it.
Steve and I were discussing permaculture this evening, and he cited the example of Havana. Seemed like a case of unexamined inputs to me, so I did some research. Steve said Havana was producing 80% of its own food through agriculture, but the only reference I could find remotely like that came from the Good Food Directory:
Granted, Cuba is small, so that in itself is fairly impressive–but there’s a significant difference between Havana producing 80% of its own food, and Cuba producing 80% of its own food.
Now, Havana does have some very impressive urban agriculture. But this interview with Luis Sanchez Almanza gives us something that sounds a little more realistic to me, regarding Havana’s suburb of Santa Fe:
Finally, Scott G. Chaplowe’s “Havana’s Popular Gardens: Sustainable Urban Agriculture” highlights some of the problems in Havana–precisely the problems I would expect of such a project:
Mind you, these are all laudable efforts, and things we should consider undertaking ourselves, but unless these sources are sorely mistaken, Havana does not set seem to set any precedent for a “sustainable city.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 January 2006 @ 11:25 PM
This was from an article in Harper’s Magazine in June, called “The Cuba Diet”
“every formerly vacant lot in Havana seems to be a small farm. The city grew 300,000 tons of food last year, nearly its entire vegetable supply and more than a token amount of its rice and meat, said Egidio Páez Medina, who oversees the organopónicos”
So, it seems they can produce most of their specialty goods, but not the staples.
It’s a really interesting article. It does seem to imply though that these less destructive farming techniques would and will be discontinued the moment the opportunity to import farm chemicals once again presents itself.
Here’s the link:
http://www.harpers.org/TheCubaDiet.html
Comment by limukala — 17 January 2006 @ 12:16 AM
If Lovelock is right, and he probably is, then humanity is pretty much doomed, City or Country, hunter-gatherer or not. This site is great, but I feel it has overlooked the possibility that we may have screwed up the planet so badly that we will not survive in any form.
Now, if we kick off a Runaway Greenhouse effect before Industrial Civilization buys it… (Or have we done so already, without realizing it? Everyone used to scoff at the 5 to 8 degrees Centrigrade of warming Lovelock mentions, but now they don’t. What if it is even worse? If effects we haven’t taken into account are slowly getting started?)
Comment by Eric — 17 January 2006 @ 2:20 AM
I’m still hoping that there’s a chance for life in urban edge environments — ones close enough to the city so that you can scavenge from the leftovers and far enough away to plot out and regenerate some land. Especially here, near the Santa Monica mountains, there are still oaks and other forms of local food.
Sigh. Hate to think I’m one day going to have to move away from home.
Of course, collapse in L.A. is going to be fascinating. It’s a car-culture so when fuel prices go up, things are going to contract quick. It’s doubtful hordes of cannibals are getting anywhere in any reasonable space of time.
That might be enough for semi-isolated tribes to be the ones left standing. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking…
Best
Bill Maxwell
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 17 January 2006 @ 3:06 AM
I think what is important in the Hemmenway essay is the vision is provides. It’s not a long term vision but it is one that I think we are going to need. Their are very few people talking sensibly about how we are going to cooperate when peak oil starts to bite in. A lot of people are preparing to hole up somewhere with 100 years of tinned food and a supply of amo but not many are talking about relying on our community for survival - which is what most people are going to end up doing.
I’m not saying what Hemenway suggests is permanently sustainable or that his reasoning is very deep but he does (perhaps accidentally) tell a story about reliance on community that is rare. Perhaps our form of civilsation is so anti-community that it just doesn’t occur to us.
I agree that high density cities are not sustainable but people like David Holmgren have pointed out that suburbia lends itself to permaculture solutions and the reality is that most people in the western world are going to be living in suburbia and needing to be able to grow their own food - maybe even in a few years.
I’m interested in what you make of the claims of biointensive gardeners that they can feed a person all year round on 1000 square feet. I believe there is a book with a title to this effect but that some other writings suggest a larger (but still not large)area is required.
Comment by Aaron — 17 January 2006 @ 5:49 AM
Hey –
When I read Gaea’s Garden (Hemenway), I found the one, consistant, ‘problem’ I had with all of the permaculture info was the sense that to make it work, one must strictly control how the garden evolved. That may sound strange, because it is the antithesis of some of the outright statements in the book… but the undercurrent was there as clear as day, IMO.
Now, hearing about his ‘failed’ attempt and the well water he used, etc etc, I have to assume that he was trying to force unsuitable plants to survive, simply because they were the plants he WANTED to survive. For permaculture to be truly viable, I really believe that it must be approached on the assumption that we are enablers. We can provide a plot of land with the nutrients, organic matter and starter plants that will allow it to develop a rich ecosystem — and then we must LEAVE IT ALONE. Natural Selection knows much better than we what works and what doesn’t. (I should modify that — if a given plant or set of plants don’t take, I see no problem with adding others that may do better… but the objective HAS TO BE to make ourselves irrelevant in the long term)
Janene
Comment by Janene — 17 January 2006 @ 10:08 AM
Not overlooked; thesis #28 addressing that very question of human survival will go up today. Basically, as profoundly negative as our impact has been, it is simply hubristic to think we can wipe out life on earth. Life is resilient. The very devastation we create makes niches for new and different types of life.
As far as escalating global warming goes, there are always negative forces that push it back into balance. I agree entirely that when it’s all said and done, it’s going to settle at a much hotter balance–probably one where there’s really no part of the earth suitable for agriculture, I’ll even go so far as to agree that there may be a band about the equator that’s uninhabitable for humans.
Ever hear of the Snowball Earth? Scientists discounted it, because the albedo would be so high that the planet would never be able to warm up to its current temperature. They forgot to factor in the beginning of life–and with it, the beginning of the greenhouse effect with the atmoshperic changes that ultimately led to the Oxygen Holocaust. Once that was illustrated, it became a lot more feasible. Point being, there’s always something to push it back into balance–there’s always some new state of equilibrum.
Lovelock’s a great ecologist, but he’s a poor anthropologist. Civilization is incredibly fragile, but humans are as adaptable as cockroaches. We evolved on the African savanna; we’re well adapted to warmer climes. He’s right that our civilization will likely collapse, but he seems to conclude from that, that humanity will die along with it. That’s not how any previous collapse worked, and I don’t see any reason why this one should work that way, either. What I see as Lovelock’s error is as understandable as it is profound: civilization is not humanity.
I’ve been assuming that all of this will be the case. That will mean a rearrangement of the coasts and, basically, all of our climate zones shifting pole-ward. Temperate zones and tropical zones will still exist–they’ll just exist at different latitudes. Polar climates may disappear. It’ll be something to adapt to, that’s for sure, and it’s going to require populations to be willing and able to migrate with the changing climate. But humans are up to it. We’ve survived climate changes before, like the end of the ice age. We’ll survive this one, too.
But ultimately …. if all of humanity’s going to die, and it’s too late to do anything about it now, then there’s not much else to do but what we’re doing, is there? There comes a point where you need to rely on Pascal’s wager to determine your course. Even if we’re all doomed–and I find that highly unlikely–what better course could we pursue than the one we’re on?
Interesting. The idea of building a community and relying on that for survival is probably the most oft-repeated refrain I’ve heard, coming from all quarters, so I didn’t find Hemenway’s suggestion on that score to be at all unique. Instead, I found the unique part of his message to be a distinctly ill-conceived–and therefore doomed–way of pulling such a community together.
May well be–depending on where that 1,000 square feet is located. Under the right conditions, sure. But not all 1,000 square feet plots are created equal.
Janene, whenever somebody like Hemenway comes along and makes me think this whole permaculture thing isn’t such a hot idea, you’re always there to show me a way that it could be a really great thing. Maintains my continuing ambiguity on the subject, and I thank you for that.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 11:01 AM
Cool
Janene
Comment by Janene — 17 January 2006 @ 1:23 PM
“Interesting. The idea of building a community and relying on that for survival is probably the most oft-repeated refrain I’ve heard, coming from all quarters”
Maybe in the circles you move in, but mainstream life is pretty much anti-community, most people think they are going to have to go it alone and much of the peak oil community seems to be made up of mainstream people for whom this is their only activist issue. Maybe this is just my experience but I’ve found it quite hard to talk to them about survival in the suburbs
Comment by Aaron — 17 January 2006 @ 4:48 PM
While I doubt that any city could grow its required foodstuffs within the city proper, it seems no one has considered the idea of small city-states, wherein a hefty amount of farmland surrounds a high-density (2,500 people per square mile), low population (500,000 citizens) city.
The city could supply 25% of the required food. The rest would come from the farmland surrounding the city. Food would be traded for services, or for manufactured goods; city-states could trade with surrounding tribes and other, faraway cities.
Now, whether or not this is a good idea and whether it is sustainable I will not say (I would suggest that such a city would be significantly less unsustainable), but the thought is at least a feasible one.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 17 January 2006 @ 6:22 PM
Hence my discussion of hinterland, and transportation, as that’s the obvious solution to the problem. Except, how do you get the hinterland to go along with being exploited in a collapse scenario?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 6:32 PM
For transportation, I thought about that. It may seem to be stupid at first look, but if a city is on the coast (as most would be, for trade purposes and because that’s where the rivers tend to be widest) then most farmland would be upslope of the city. Transportation of food and/or goods into the city would be mainly downhill, which is significantly easier than uphill, esp. when using a simple wheeled cart. Getting the cart back to the farm is a different matter, but it would be of course much lighter. The problem may be solved even better by building carts out of woods like bamboo and balsa.
As for getting people to accept being exploited, I have no hard and fast answer, but I guarantee that many people would go along with such a system, and not even consider themselves to be exploited. Government on a scale comprehensible to its citizens is not a perfect solution, but it’s better than what we’ve got. Believing that the Sovereign Nation of Seattle or the City-State of Portland is the best place in the whole wide world to live would also help a great deal. People who’ve never been anywhere else believe this every day, just ask the average American.
There is a draw to the horticulturalist’s life. If the farmer is celebrated, like in Russia and (I believe) fuedal Japan, people might even do it of their own volition.
Also, an oft overlooked point among primitivists is that there are actually people who prefer to be in a hierarchical system. This isn’t because they’re stupid or because they’re magically better adapted to it, but because they like it. That there will never be a time where you cannot find at least one person who wants to live in a city, who wants to be a part of the SNS or the CS of P.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 17 January 2006 @ 10:04 PM
At first, no doubt. But every civilization must spend a great deal of its energy on legitimizing activities–providing some excuse for its existence, and providing the impression that it serves some purpose. The city would need to justify this position to the hinterland–not at first, but with the passage of a few years, that would become a major issue.
I reject that. I believe there are many people who’ve made their peace with it and accepted it, but I don’t think there’s anyone who likes it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 January 2006 @ 11:03 PM
Comment by limukala — 18 January 2006 @ 2:58 AM
The primary action objective of the Post Carbon peak oil community is building relocalization networks. The intent is to begin a networked movement that cultivates the seeds of a parallel public infrastructure with the ultimate goal of bioregions comprised of locally interdependent ecocities, eco-towns, sustainable food production, and wild areas. The seeds already exist in our communities – in the memories of the elders, the wisdom and practices of indigenous people, non-governmental groups working on localization, entrepreneurs that want to improve the community, dedicated local government officials and individuals who understand the importance of preparing for an energy-constrained future.
Comment by ov — 18 January 2006 @ 6:33 AM
The ones who kill themselves in record numbers? I know a lot of those elites and, frankly, even they don’t like this setup.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 10:37 AM
Actually, I was referring to the military. I see it every day. Hell, I’m sitting in the office and I’m looking at someone who loves it as I type.
::Shrug:: All I can suggest is that you don’t know everything. By ouright rejecting a possiblity, you limit what you can know and understand about the world. I could understand if you said that you found that possibility extremely unlikely, or that you’d never seen it before, and didn’t expect to. But there are a lot of people who have rejected things in the past, and it hasn’t made their rejections untrue.
I’m not saying that I’m unequivocally right or that you’re unequivocally wrong (or vica versa), but just that we don’t know whether there are any humans alive today who would choose hierarchy over egalitarianism. We can’t know for sure until we actually see it. I think that it could happen, and you think it couldn’t. I make no moral judgment about whether such a choice would be right or wrong. You have your opinion, I have mine. Neither one of us knows for sure.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 18 January 2006 @ 12:23 PM
I can’t even concieve of it. I’ve never met someone who, on some level, didn’t think something was terribly wrong with all this. Even military types. I can’t even imagine how such a person could exist. So, I reject it. I’d have to meet such a person before I’d be able to entertain the possibility that it exists.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 12:29 PM
Jason,
re: people loving hierarchy, I’ve met some. The bottom line for them is that no matter how bad it gets, the reward is waiting just over the horizon. A better world. Yup. It’s almost here. Really. Any minute now.
And they can live entire lives like that. It’s kind of spooky.
Best
Bill Maxwell
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 18 January 2006 @ 3:24 PM
Oh, I’ve met people like that, too. I’ve met people who, on the surface, seem like they love the system. But if you get to know them, you find out that they’ve simply made their peace with it, not that they like it. They may accept it as a necessary evil, but that’s a very different thing from liking it. They believe their reward is just around the corner, but that doesn’t mean they don’t recognize the cost. Even for those that feel they “made good,” they can recognize that something is wrong. They may feel it’s all worth it, and they may not believe you if you tell them it doesn’t have to be this way, but they still know that something is wrong.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 4:05 PM
::shrug:: Okay. I can’t argue with that sort of logic. I can just point out that simply because you can’t concieve of such a person and/or you’ve never met such a person doesn’t mean they can’t exist. I’m not claiming that they do, just that they may.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 18 January 2006 @ 4:43 PM
To allow the possibility would require me to fundamentally rearrange my entire conception of humanity, the universe, and the philosophical nature of reality. To date, that understanding has shown great predictive power, like a good scientific hypothesis should. So, I find it more likely that there are no such people–that anyone, if you get to know them, will reveal their discomfort with the current situation.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 January 2006 @ 4:58 PM
“For permaculture to be truly viable, I really believe that it must be approached on the assumption that we are enablers. We can provide a plot of land with the nutrients, organic matter and starter plants that will allow it to develop a rich ecosystem — and then we must LEAVE IT ALONE.”
Janene, I completely agree with you. Are you implementing this approach yourself? It’s just the kind of thing I’ve been trying to work out. Sort of intensive hunter-gathering, if there can ever be such a thing.
I really like the Anthropik approach of just leaping into the wilderness, but you lot are lucky to be in a part of the world where this is possible. In Europe this would be like jumping into an empty swimming pool.
Europe is pretty crowded, and national parks in Britain consist of FARMS. Real wilderness can only be found in Scandinavia, or eastern Europe, neither of which appeal to me. In theory I suppose I could live there, but I am not as confident as Jason et al are in the immediacy of the crash, and I also think it could take a Bill Joy form, rather that a James Lovelock one. I therefore think it could take much longer, so I want to live somewhere where I won’t get too cold or depressed. Land is also expensive. The result of all this is that I am very keen on staying in the nicer parts of Europe and taking the approach of encouraging nature to be more edible in a kind of fusion of permaculture with the kind of philosophy we have on this site. Whether this is a viable approach or not is something I have yet to find out. But I hope so - it’s always nice when the world conforms to one’s ideology.
Comment by Clive — 18 January 2006 @ 5:31 PM
Hey Clive –
I’m just getting started
This fall I read Hemenway’s Gaea’s Garden and last summer, I had my very first ‘wild’ tomato plant. Next spring, I am planning a permaculture design around my crab apple tree and we’ll see how that goes.
Certainly, as my experiments progress, I will be making reports.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 18 January 2006 @ 6:12 PM
Janene,
good luck! I hope to be able to begin messing around with the practicalities this year as well. I’ve just got hold of Vol. I of “Edible Forest Gardens” by Dave Jacke, and his ideas (and data) seem to be pretty helpful. Also, I don’t know if you’ve been there yet, but the Plants For A Future website is a pretty good resource with a massive database.
Comment by Clive — 18 January 2006 @ 7:03 PM
There are people who love the current situation because the benefit greatly from it. There are also those who would agree to anything - and they don’t count.
Comment by Rick Larson — 18 January 2006 @ 11:18 PM
Or, you could just allow the possibility that there are things about humans that are outside your experience.
Frankly, I’m a bit puzzled at how shocking you find the idea that there may be some humans, somewhere, that prefer hierarchy to egalitarianism. It’s not such a big deal. It’s not attacking your ideas, and it’s not attacking you. Yet you seem to react so ferociously in defense.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 19 January 2006 @ 12:01 AM
Chuck, think about it. If a human, any human, truely enjoyed civilization. Being enslaved, etc, the whole shabang. That would indicate that either people are or are well on the way to becoming fully adapted to being civilized. This changes a lot of things. It’s also not supported by the evidence. Remember, the United States, shining light of civilization, has incrediably high mental illness rates, suicide, etc. The very fact that our movement exists indicates that people do not love civilization. Although a majority suffers from a lack of imagination or motivation.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 19 January 2006 @ 2:47 AM
Ben,
I’ll take this one point at a time.
No, it would just indicate that those who enjoyed it had a differing mindset from the mainstream, based on either genetics or the way they were raised, or both, or neither. There have been eccentrics since the beginning of ever.
God damn, deja vu. I swear, I had this exact conversation last night at dinner with a friend. Of course it changes things. That’s why you prepare for its possibility now. If it ends up that there were, in fact, no humans who wanted to live in city-states and are willing to be career horticulturalists, then so be it. If there are, then you’ve already planned for and mentally dealt with the contingency. As an Eagle Scout, I say, “Be Prepared.”
Yes, hierarchy sure does do that to people. But that’s not the evidence being argued. What’s being argued is the absence of evidence one way or another…
…and this is exactly what I mean. From a purely scientific standpoint, that your movement exists does NOT indicate that people do not love civilization, but rather that quite a few people do not love civilization. That quite a few people hate hierarchy. But nowhere can I see conclusive evidence against the existence of a fringe group of people who deal with hierarchy well. Which was my original point anyway… beyond using bamboo carts to transport food into the cities (and humanure out).
Once again, I don’t claim that there ARE such folk, only that they MAY exist. I make no claim for the positive or the negative.
I can’t figure out why you seem so utterly repulsed by this idea. If my mind can mesh it with no problem, why does it seem to be such a big deal here?
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 19 January 2006 @ 10:46 AM
That’s exactly what I’m saying, though. Even those who benefit most materially are working 80 or more hours a week, they never see their families, they die of stress-related disorders or they kill themselves. Even they aren’t happy with it. When I talk to them, even they fantasize about being able to live out in the woods….
It’s the implication of it. If someone prefers hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake … I mean, my G-d, think of what a person would be. Most of us can see that sharing, respect, freedom, etc. are all good things in principle. We may disagree on how to achieve them, but you’re talking about someone who sees terror, domination and invincibility as good in and of themselves. A villain with no motivation–a being of pure evil without any redeeming motivation or core. Someone who enjoys evil for its own sake. Even Hitler was motivated by the same things that motivate us–he just had different ideas of how to go about it. Satan is motivated by the same things that motivate us. You’re talking about a being that’s more pure in its evil than that. You’re talking about something that’s not even recognizable as an animal anymore.
No, it would mean that they believed that hierarchy was the best way to achieve freedom, sharing, respect, etc. The basic motivations would be the same–it would only be our means of attaining them that differ. Such a person could not be characterized as “enjoying hierarchy”–they would, rather, be someone who sees hierarchy as an acceptable means to an end, a price worth paying, but not something good in itself. That I can understand. I’ve met many such people, and I understand them quite well. But that’s a very different thing from someone who genuinely enjoys hierarchy itself.
OK, well, here’s my thinking on it.
There may be people who enjoy hierarchy in its own right. Such people, then, enjoy commanding others, and enjoy being a slave to others. Their cruelty is matched only by their cowardice–such must be the nature of someone who would genuinely appreciate hierarchy.
Such beings must not be suffered to exist–their very existence is a threat to all life. If such beings exist, then the human race must be exterminated to wipe out any possibility of such beings continuing to exist. We must all join the voluntary human extinction movement immediately, and begin plans to make the entire human race infertile to ensure our destruction.
There’s my conclusion, if such a thing is possible. But, I cannot concieve of how such a thing could be. Simply biologically, how could such a thing arise?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 11:25 AM
Jason,
In regards to the city situation:
We’ll see. History is, after all, a much better judge of our future than we are.
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 19 January 2006 @ 3:02 PM
No doubt.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 January 2006 @ 3:04 PM
Janene, check this out:
http://www.emilycompost.com/bookworms.htm#“Gardening%20Without%20Work”
On this we can agree; that hierarchy is an evil as to it’s end result. Anyone knowingly particpating in it is evil. However, many are ignorant as to the result of hierarchy.
Comment by Rick Larson — 19 January 2006 @ 10:20 PM
Yes, but to actually enjoy hierarchy, whether you’re ignorant of its effects or not … to enjoy it, you would need to enjoy being chattle to another. You would also have to enjoy having chattle of your own. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s description of demons in The Screwtape Letters.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 January 2006 @ 11:32 AM
Thanks to all for the comments on my “Urban and Rural Sustainability” article. A deeper look and a reply to some of the many comments I received elsewhere appeared in Permaculture Activist #58 and is posted at http://www.patternliteracy.com/urban2.html
The first post here by Jason Godesky shows a misunderstanding of what permaculture is. It is absolutely not horticulture. Making seedballs is not doing permaculture, although it may apply some permaculture principles better than, say, tillage (done by most horticulturists). I can’t do it justice here, but permaculture is a whole-systems design approach based on principles derived from natural ecosystems and sustainable cultures. These are principles like “each element should serve multiple functions� and “catch and store energy and materials on the site.� It applies to designing buildings and communities as much as it does to food systems. Most people historically have come to permaculture through gardening, but I know plenty of permaculturists who don’t have gardens.
It’s true that my wife and I chose a site not well suited to food production. We bought it long before I took my first permaculture course. It had no water and poor soil, and was too isolated. Initially, with long days of work, we got what I’d call a good sustainable yield from the land while greatly restoring its ecological health, but after 7-8 years I found I liked to do other things besides farm, and scaled back my efforts. The techniques I’d been using were working well, and even with little work we were getting lots of food from the land; but that land really wanted to be forest and I was too aware of fighting it.
I’m not sure how people got the idea that I think cities are models of sustainability. They aren’t. My point was that most rural people use more resources, and are more dependent on cars and oil, than most urban dwellers. Contemporary rural life is even less sustainable than cities. 94% of all ruralites do not farm (US census data); they have regular jobs like city folk. So when the oil runs out, why would you expect that simply having a really big yard is going to save you when you and all your neighbors are out of work and far from where everything but (most) food is currently produced? Many cities until recently, especially in Europe, produced at least half their own food. Portland officials have calculated that within citi limits we have land to produce nearly 80% ofourown food, without cutting down extensive urban forest.
Cities before oil, and even up to the 1960s, were fed by rings of farms around them. Maybe that’s what suburbia will become, market gardens surrounding the cities. Many cities, like Portland, are built on and ringed by prime agricultural land. I have grown about 40% of my food needs on a fraction of my 5000-square-foot lot; how much more land do I need? I’m not saying post-oil will be a picnic, just that fleeing the cities is not the answer and is not necessary. Some say that cities are parasites on the surrounding land, but the surrounding population is just as dependent on cities for nearly everything but food: tools, medicine, culture, science, art, education, etc. It’s not parasitical, it’s symbiotic.
One more point: I wasn’t “accidentally” telling a story about community in my essay. That was the whole point: community is esential for sustainability, wherever you are.
I’m pleased that the article triggered so much discussion. Thanks for taking the time to comment on it.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 24 January 2006 @ 3:27 PM
Hey Toby –
Thanks for stopping by and adding your comments. I read your follow up essay and while I disagree with some of your expectations, its all about healthy skepticism(on both our parts).
Anyway, I just wanted to comment on Jason’s statement of permaculture as a horticultural practice. What you did not see (as it is discussed elsewhere) is that Jason is using the Anthropological term horticulture: meaning cultivation as a portion of a cultures subsistance strategy, or more technically ‘cultivation below the point of diminishing returns.’ Not to be confused with the common usage term horticulture: meaning simply gardening. within Anthropology, the Native Americans using Three Sisters, and the amazonian natives using swidden techniques are both horticulture — as is permaculture, fukuoka seedballing and other ‘new’ techniques.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 24 January 2006 @ 4:41 PM
Mr. Hemenway, it’s a pleasure to have you here. A fellow member of our tribe, Steve Thomas, is a big fan of your work.
As Janene already pointed out, I think the discrepency has less to do with my misunderstanding of permaculture, than your misunderstanding of horticulture. Horticulture here refers to the anthropological category. Amazonian Indians, the Iroquois, and many, many others are indigenous examples of horticulturalists. The Lawa discussed by Koetke in “The Final Empire,” as recently cited by Gumph, are another kind of horticulturalist. Like permaculture, there is a consideration of sustainability, and an attempt to mimic the designs of nature. Like permaculture, cultivation is often supplemented with hunting. Most of permaculture’s most successful techniques have been used by horticulturalists for millions of years. I’m afraid there’s nothing you’ve said of permaculture that does not equally apply to other, indigenous horticulturalists.
I think your more recent article is much more clear, and though I think your characterization of collapse is dodgy at best, I must express my complete agreement with you that “going back to the land” is certainly a doomed strategy in itself, and that the key to survival is almost certainly community.
A lot more, I would think. It’s not just the percentage of food that matters, but also the type. The food you’re growing is probably the most land area efficient stuff, but how much protein is coming from that? If you’re going to get your protein from meat, you’ll need to either hunt it (necessitating large, nearby wilderness), or raise it (necessitating lots of grazing land).
I think your characterization of “rings of farms” is slightly misleading, though. Ancient and medieval cities were fed by their hinterlands, yes, but your phrase makes that seem almost small. A city’s hinterland stretched for a hundred miles in every direction. They needed a significant population of farmers working an enormous amount of land to supply enough food for them, and that was completely unsustainable. The cities died as the land did. The cities were enormous leeches that bled huge, thriving ecosystems until they were dead. These were no minor “rings of farms,” but enormous blights on the earth itself. The Industrial Revolution was a revolution of degree, not kind.
Ecological footprint ultimately only tells part of the story. Population growth is so explosive in the Third World because the ecological footprint is so small. In the First World, our footprints are much larger, so our population growth stabilizes. Hunter-gatherers have been the most ecologically friendly people to ever live, but their ecological footprints were much larger than even the most ostentatious American. The Agricultural Revolution shrank that footprint significantly, and the Industrial Revolution shrank it again. So, obviously, the size of one’s ecological footprint is not nearly so straightforward a metric as we might at first imagine.
I tend not to separate cities and their hinterlands much, myself. You’re right, they rely on each other. I see them both as an enormously destructive parasite on the ecology that they slowly kill off–but a single entity, at that.