I recently read a long and complicated essay on place-based adaptation to biophysical collapse. It discussed policy, transport, economics — all local, but all also rather superfluous to the human being. In talking of the inadequacy of urban housing, the author claimed that “nothing is more vital for human existence than shelter.” Except maybe food? But on food, the author was silent, a common but baffling omission from urban writers who can’t seem to imagine a world in which food does not magically appear in urban markets and restaurants, completely independent of rural producers. There are reasons for this lack of vision. Elite urbanites generally are blind to the reality of embodied living and its basic need of food — perhaps intentionally — because they don’t want to do any of that, they can’t do any of that, they can’t see any way to remain elites while doing any of that, they would have to admit that they really aren’t elites relative to people who can do all that, and they probably would not survive if they had to rely on doing any of it.
Another writer was lamenting the lack of writing on suburban homesteading. Where are all the books on the people who are muddling along trying to survive in this crumbling urban world, she asked. Why do we always get to hear about the city people who fanned out into the rural wilds and learned to fend for themselves? (If one doesn’t count the substantial wealth necessary to that endeavor as one of the fending tools, that is…) To answer that question I would ask another: where are all the books on actual farmers, on those who already fend for themselves and feed all the rest of us as well?
The lack of books on small sufficiencies and primary producers comes from the lack of writers living these lives — because people living those lives don’t have the time or resources to turn their stories into published works. We read the words of the privileged, those who have the leisure to write because they are not doing the work of production. The essay on place-based adaptation blatantly revealed the author’s biases and blindnesses in saying that “The strongest centers [of adaptation] will be metropolitan areas with large progressive populations, and states with progressive majorities.” This, when modern urbanites can do exactly nothing to sustain a human being, never mind build adaptations for the future. This, when “place-based” involves, by definition, localized and diverse methods of adaptation, none of which are centrally led by urbanites who have no idea what other places need nor how to produce those needs. This, when we don’t have the luxury of setting some people apart from the work of production in order to lead. There will be no strongest centers, and those best at adaptation will not be leaders. They won’t even have time to be interested in what is happening outside their small communities.
Urbanites are not going to lead the way toward a sustainable human culture — because urban places are not sustainable. Primary production does not happen in urban areas and it can’t. There is not enough space to both house people in high density and grow food or fiber or produce building materials or mine feedstocks of stone, metals and energy. Nor are any urban centers located in places where any of this can happen even if all the people were evicted. Urban centers are great places for trade and at one time used to be good as transport hubs, but urban centers have not been and can not be places for primary production of the essentials for human life.
We don’t necessarily need human-centered zoning laws, public housing and walkable cities, though those are all good things. We need food and clothing and bodily care. Cities don’t produce those needs. Cities merely process and trade those things. In fact, there is no such thing as a truly walkable city. You can not walk to where the food is produced. You can only walk to where the food is sold. It was transported many miles to get to that place. It was also produced in ways that are dependent on transport of many other goods, these days with labor that is transported from other countries. None of which is in walkable distance to you in your urban home.
Similarly, you can’t walk to where your clothing is produced. Your clothes have very likely transversed the globe before getting to an urban shop where you buy them. The materials that went into your clothes probably circled the entire planet a few times before becoming the clothes you put onto your body. Many of the clothes you are wearing right now were synthesized from petroleum and use dyes that were also synthesized from petroleum. I daresay you do not have a petroleum source in your neighborhood, never mind a factory that can refine oil into plastics and dyes and then further spin those dyed plastics into thread and then weave them into shirts and underwear and stretchy pants and hair ties.
You can walk to buy things. You can not walk to a place that actually produces things in a city. And that is not going to change even as we bring production back into one geographic region. In a city, you will still not be living near the place where the grain is grown or the sheep are shorn. (You really don’t want to be living where fabric is dyed or leather is tanned, but that’s another issue and one that zoning laws do help with…)
Now, you might say that we have enough of many things to get by. Surely we don’t need any more hair ties and stretchy pants. Maybe we even have enough clothing to keep us all from nudity for a while if it were better distributed. And in that case, maybe cities would help. Ship all the excess to the urban masses and make sure that everybody gets what they need. Except that’s really not going to work.
For one thing, we have an abundance of the wrong things. We have mountains of t-shirts and trainers. There is rather less clothing that works in a temperate-climate winter. But the bigger problem is that we’ve been focused on selling t-shirts and trainers in large volume, not making them to last. So what we’ve made for many decades now hardly lasts a year of wear. If we stopped making t-shirts today, we would very quickly have mountains of t-shirt scraps and no actual shirts left. Probably toxic mountains, because nearly all our t-shirts are made using some form of plastic or dye.
The mountain of waste is another thing that always gets brushed under the table in urban elite writing and theorizing. (Despite not fitting under the table by any approximation.) A city is a waste stream, and very little of that can be reclaimed. Merely the exhaust from the transport necessary to get primary goods to a city is cooking our planet. Humans living in concentration has always been a bad thing for humans — and for whatever comes in contact with those dense populations and their wastes.
But what of that shelter? Don’t cities at least efficiently house millions? Not really. Even the place-making essayist said as much, though he blamed the lack of housing on such things as expensive rent and short-term leases. But shelter is not only a mostly impermeable roof and a place to sleep. Shelter is protection for the human body, the place where the human body finds rest and sustenance. Modern urban living arrangements largely do not qualify as shelter, and this will get worse as we head deeper into biophysical collapse.
In fact, most existing buildings, urban and otherwise, are functionally useless in an age of extreme temperatures and weather. We can’t even “wear them a year” and then make mountains of exhausted building trash. They are already insufficient as shelter, possibly dangerous, and this is especially true in the sorts of structures built in densely populated areas. People die in tall buildings when the electricity goes out, when the heat gets too much, when the cold gets too much, when water supplies fail. It is difficult to live even when the elevator dies. And elevators will die. In my office, we have an elevator that had its essential parts flooded in July. It is still inoperable at the end of October. Because it is apparently impossible to get replacements for those essential parts. Fortunately, the building is only three levels, but we have an old customer base. They can’t climb those three levels of stairs… Now, imagine this happening in a hospital. Or an elder care facility. Or an average 10-story high-rise.
Urban writers are blind to these flaws in their lives. Probably necessarily blind. They could not be urban writers if they drew attention to urban faults. There would be no more urban… Too many words written about cities as they actually are and cities would fall apart. The same can be said of our whole culture. So, not much is said of the fact that there isn’t a material or energetic path to maintaining our current systems, never mind adapting them.
Economy. Politics. Infrastructures and modes of living. Production and distribution of needs. None of it is sustainable. It’s not merely the carbon all these systems toss into the atmosphere, though that’s the only thing that gets much mention. Our way of life is inherently unsustainable. Biophysical breakdown is just one of the effects of ignoring the limits of a finite planet, of treating Earth as an inexhaustible resource pool and a waste dump. The system itself is consuming its own foundations – labor, materials, energy and social agreements. This last includes such things as value and hierarchical arrangements. In our modern minds, it is theoretically possible to concentrate value into the hands of a perpetually shrinking coterie. It’s also theoretically possible to infinitely grow the economy. Indeed, our economy is dependent on both theories being true — infinite growth and infinite wealth concentration. This should have been a red flag to theorists. But theorists are largely urbanites and very good at missing red flags.
Our systems are built on infinite resource use, infinite labor, infinite markets, and infinite waste streams so that all these can grow… infinitely. If there is no growth, capitalism is difficult to maintain. And in the recent system of creating value through lending money, growth is absolutely prerequisite. As long as this project remained small relative to the planet, it might have felt like there were actual infinities. But a few generations of perpetual growth – also known as exponential growth from the equations that track the changes over time – quickly turns a small population into an infestation. Humans are now become a virus, and the planet’s immune response has been triggered. And this is obvious to everyone but urban elites… who just keep saying that more of the same will save us.
The longer we try to prop up this project and keep the current systems in place, the less we have to work with to adapt to new conditions. The less we adapt the more likely it is that we will fail catastrophically. It seems likely, given headlines, that if we aren’t adapting right now to lower energy use, more localized systems, and more community production of needs, then we are probably going to have a shortened lifespan. To be blunt, in the midst of breakdown, nobody’s going to feed your sorry ass. More importantly, there won’t be surplus food production to feed many others beyond the producers. And this will be most true in the near term, not in some hazy dystopian future.
It may be that later systems will be built to feed urbanites, but it will take decades to clean whatever soil is available and remove concrete barriers to that soil — entailing the removal of the people that make all that urban concrete necessary. Given that reality — no food and much-reduced housing — it sure isn’t clear why anyone would remain in cities. Not for the decades that it will take to remediate urban areas and make them food-safe anyway. Moreover, the first people to go will likely be those with nothing to lose and everything to gain, those who own nothing. This is also, not coincidentally, the group who currently do most of the real work in a city, those who have all the productive skills in a city. So who is going to do the remediation work in a city? Who is going to do the productive work? Who is going to spend a lifetime to turn a city into a farm, and how are they providing for themselves until local food production becomes a reality? And why do that? It’s easier to just leave the place that can’t feed you. I don’t see a reason or a mechanism for turning cities into farms. Perhaps urban writers can see something I can’t…
Incidentally, this same logic is why billionaire bunkers are not going to work out well. Billionaires have no useful skills. They can’t feed themselves. They have no way to force people to do work for them in the midst of collapse. Nobody’s going to feed their sorry billionaire asses. The people who can take care of themselves are going to take care of themselves, and they won’t spend a second on the care and feeding of useless elites.
We see this in history repeatedly. Collapse means the end of urban life because those with skills just leave, to go fend for themselves wherever that is easiest. And the prospects for today’s urban elites are worse than in the past. Cities used to be productive centers. There used to be things made in cities that urbanites could trade with primary producers. But after decades of the global race to bottom-wages and hyper-financialisation, most cities have nothing to offer, nothing of real value to exchange for food or resources or labor.
Moreover, it isn’t obvious how primary producers could transport food to urbanites even if trade was desired. Low energy transport infrastructure does not exist now and doesn’t seem to be coming along any time soon. Like many of the things we needed to do to adapt, it has not been started and will not likely be started now that we’ve run out of time. Who is going to build the next transportation system? Who is going to pay for it all? How are the laborers going to have their bodily needs met while building? What are they building this system out of? Where do all those material resources come from? And how are those materials transported to building sites if it’s the transportation system itself that is being built?
Lovely circularity, no? But that’s the dilemma. Or maybe the poly-dilemma. None of this adaptation work is done now. Most of it isn’t started. The materials and labor are not funded or provided for. Nothing is stockpiled where it is needed, ready to go. So nothing is going to be built. And here we are swimming in biophysical collapse. Now is not the time to try to remediate the hopeless causes. Now is the time to abandon the Titanic as quickly as possible and head for open water before it takes us all down to the icy depths. The time to adapt cities is gone, if that ever was a possibility. It is time to leave.
And urban elites know this. They are doing everything in their power to keep people in place. To stop the inevitable hemorrhaging of skilled labor as the actual working classes go find places where they can build their own lives. To keep primary producers sending all the food to urban markets and restaurants. To prop up the dying system that makes them who they are even at the loss of their own future.
I read articles like the one about food-free urban adaptation of policies and theories and I want to cry. These are seemingly reasonable people… and yet they are bat-shit crazy. And they are controlling all the messaging and narrative in this culture. They are actively interfering with real adaptation. Just so they can remain urban elites.
All I can think is that we desperately need those books on real farmers…
©Elizabeth Anker 2023
By My Solitary Hearth 
The woman who does Soilmaking in West Lafayette, Indiana, Jody Tishmack, is an unusual case.
She commented on your Resilience article “Where Are All The People?” which was primarily about impossible demographics in the USA. Jody lives in a bunker house with metal pull-down shutters in the suburbs and has another property where she receives and processes the components to make garden topsoil, by grinding, mixing with a front-end loader , testing and aging. She has a doctorate in engineering and has been in this business for about 30 years, starting as an employee of Purdue University. I’ve done some snooping and have come to some conclusions about how she afforded to get started in such a self-employment, but I don’t want to offend or belittle her by discussing it. I will summarize by noting she had some distinct advantages not available to most people wanting to be in the composting business.
Most other places and instances moderate to large scale composting/recycling operations routinely run afoul of government regulation, no matter how needed they are, and no matter how environmentally careful they try to be. A municipal authority will entertain and even promote limited household scale composting (the worms in a box sort of thing) but as soon as it demonstrates the potential to compete with fossil fuel industries serving food and ornamentals production it is reinterpreted as unsightly and a health threat. Right now I’m having trouble finding garden dirt to buy to expand my backyard beds, and I certainly can’t afford to pay Jody to haul it from southwestern Indiana to Charlotte.
You help our worldview become more realistic when you observe that there is little production of food or clothing in American cities these days. Before the Industrial Revolution there was a crisis of depleted soil. Marx/Engles were certainly not the first to seize on this idea as indicative of unsustainable Capitalist growth. They called it the “metabolic rift.” It was hard to miss all the horse manure in major cities before cars, and if you talked with seafarers they would tell about importing ships and towed barges of bat guano from remote Pacific islands to replenish the soil on manor estates. The science of soil chemistry was still emerging but any astute observer could see there was an accumulating imbalance. No juggling of the books could fix the problem. But as it turned out petroleum temporarily alleviated the nutrient waste and shortage exactly when colonial conquest of new lands was exhausting.
I hope I’m not boring you, Eliza, with such a simplistic scenario. But I think we both can comprehend the math and the magnitudes that propel exterminism. No one had replied to your insights, though, so I felt an obligation to say,”Hey, Ms. Daley, you’re exactly right.” But this line of inquiry has barely begun, as compared to the many hopeful fantasies disseminated in ecological websites and publications.
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Excellent essay! Over the last five decades, I taught myself how to grow food, make and administer herbal medicine, make clothing, and emergency preparedness. Initially, I viewed these activities as hobbies. Over the past 20 years, these hobbies have become a lifestyle, and I now view them as survival education. I moved to a rural area to create a mini-homestead, and as I age, I am considering a move back to a small urban area but I go back and forth on this idea because of the very things you discuss in this essay.
My rural area is in a historic agricultural valley: hundreds of orchards and wheat fields to the east that rely on fossil-fueled machines and migrant labor. Yet, 90% of what is grown here is shipped down the Columbia River to global markets. Fifteen years ago, a non-profit focused on developing local food economies was created. We now have a growing number of small market farms, meat producers, wool producers, and 5 farmers’ markets spread among the small towns in this 75-mile region. However, we still lack the backyard gardens that would contribute to a more sustainable and local food economy. When I drive through my area, I am stunned at all of the ornamental landscapes and not a food garden or forest in sight.
I have studied permaculture for years, completed my design certificate in 2020, and have offered to host informal classes in my community. Little interest so far. But I do follow the permaculture movement and there are good things happening in little urban pockets. But the scale is simply not there. I occasionally joke that when the shit hits the fan, I will need to replace my plastic deer fence around my 4000 sq ft garden with steel fences and locked gates!
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My father was a part-time real farmer and I know only too well how difficult farming can be. We grew our own vegetables, couldn’t produce enough eggs though, had our own meat – which I learned quickly how to handle even though I eat very little meat these days – as well as fruit and maize. The latter became a cash crop along with cotton , mangoes and gemsquash. The bottom fell out of the cotton market … drought put an end to gemsquash … and so the story goes. Some urbanites do not even know what animals their meat choices come from or even how milk ends up in the containers they buy them in. These days we even have to purchase clean drinking water in our town.
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Thank you! These are excellent observations and analyses that you have shared here, and they should be read and contemplated by many … perhaps even everyone. I rate them “excellent” because they are the same or very similar to thoughts I’ve shared for decades. Maybe this similarity arises from our shared geological perspective on things. Geology is, after all, the science of Earth and everything having to do with Earth.
I have a saying that I came up with a number of years ago: “All beings are intimately and inextricably interconnected and interdependent.”
“All beings” does not only refer to human beings. It includes all ways of being in this Universe. It includes all animal beings and plant beings and even all the beings that aren’t considered to be alive: the viruses, the water beings, the air beings, the rock beings. Everything that exists comes into being (is born), exists (‘lives’ its life), ceases to exist (dies), yet nothing simply vanishes, but is transformed into something else. And all are interconnected and interdependent.
Unfortunately, most humans, and perhaps most other beings, are unaware of this, and many would actually deny this truth of existence. And this perceived separation is at the core of our downfall. So many of us humans don’t even feel or know of our human interconnections and interdependence, and too many actively dismiss or deny anything of the sort. This renders humanity, as we currently exist, unsustainable.
And this unsustainability begins with those who are most disconnected and most incapable of producing for and caring for themselves, with most of these being concentrated in urban areas. Furthermore, all of our high level elected representatives are concentrated in urban areas, which effectively renders our highest supposed “leaders” blind the the essence of creating and maintaining a sustainable way of life for us. They certainly are not equipped – by location, knowledge, understanding, wisdom, ability – to sustain themselves, which means they don’t know how to create or implement policy that is effective towards helping the rest of us sustain our selves.
I live in a rural area in which a great many of us are producers who are quite capable of taking care of ourselves to a great extent, even to the point of producing products from raw materials and putting them to good use. I’ve inherited and learned much of this for myself and put much of it into practice over many decades. (Yeah, I’m old.) Besides having worked as a geologist and being knowledgeable in chemistry, I’ve worked as a logger and also in a sawmill. I’ve worked as a carpenter and have always been my own plumber and electrician, as well as my own repairman. I even know how to be a blacksmith. I’ve worked as an architect. I’ve grown my own vegetables and gone hunting and fishing. I’ve been a caregiver for several in our extended family. I’ve almost always lived in a three-generation household, and for a couple of stretches even in a four-generation household. Aside from the reality that I am now quite old, I could do pretty well at sustaining myself – counting, of course, on mutual aid with other self-sustaining neighbors, because we are interconnected and interdependent.
But I’ve always contrasted this sort of life with that of city folks who only know how to work in an office or factory or store for money, and shop at the grocery store and purchase new things when the old things break, or simply become tiresome and undesirable. And seek out entertainment, because most people seem to most value and be addicted to entertainment rather than reality and life. That sort of existence is definitely not sustainable, nor can people actually thrive while existing in this manner.
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Spot on! Thanks for your excellent comments!
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Here you go!
https://www.urbanvine.co/blog/urban-farming-book
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Thanks, Michael! This is a great list! I’ll forward it on. There are even a few books on here that I’d never heard of… which is something of a minor marvel.
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Well, as “one of those urbanites” I am a bit concerned about what kind of past might come by backdoor …. Yes, may be in year 1100 it was easier to live without leaving your 12 km circle. But even very existence of trade shows that humans in general were not very happy to live in such complete cultural isolation….
Also, question of slavery comes to mind … it will be not funny at all to see this returning in force and for … ever?
So, I’d prefer future where accumulated knowledge put to good, anti-exploitation use, instead of blindly trying to return to some “better” past (mostly because past was only better, relatively, to very same elites – hierarchy is way to suck from ~everyone!).
So, food is important, but by ditching thinking we may end up in situation where exactly food security is impossible, thanks to all those landwarlords fighting over their soil pathes ……
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Humans have never lived in cultural isolation. There is no such thing. There is always a community. However, humans have also very rarely lived in large, permanently-settled cities and only seem to do so when they have no choice, when forced through enclosure and other forms of systemic violence.
There is also no correlation between rural living and feudal systems or slavery. Systems of forced labor and individual property ownership, including other human bodies, are exclusively tied to centralized and hierarchical social organization. Please, read history.
More to the point, nobody advocates moving to the past — though, let’s just say that many of the ways humans lived prior to the enlightenment endured far longer than even the oldest western systems and seem to have provided humans with better lives while not degrading their world. (Not unrelated phenomena…)
What many would like to see is a human system of the future that does not rely upon that degradation. No strict structuring of society into those who labor and those who benefit. No waste streams that cannot be recycled into new life. No taking resources or work from an Other without restitution and reciprocity.
Finally, cities do not have a hegemony on thought. In fact, I would argue the opposite. It is easier to see new ways of being in right relationship with the world when you are not totally submerged in human-built infrastructures, both physical and ideological. One might point to the fact that most centers of learning and repositories of knowledge have not been associated with large human settlements, even within EuroWestern cultures.
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well, thank for reply. I am not sure if reading even most accurate history book(s) will help *me* at current stage, and while I hope things will be better than my fears … well, those near-total systems of violence inlast few thousands of years “prove” they will not go away without some … effort.
I think I am a bit overreacting to your reaction writing. You might argue that collective living knowledge of biology, astronomy, physics etc is eitheir in our blood or “not strictly needed” but I think this will bemistake.
of course you may just choose to focus on things and ideas that got too little attention among all this technophilia – but so far a lot of modern tech craft (by modern here I mean like last 200 years or so …) just not really finding its place in your internal world? Even if I remember correctly you noticed physical books take a lot of space (and some tech to mass produce …). Same with film, or even old-style photo plates. Fun to make one, but too slow for catching moment about say bird’s fly or model aeroplane someone trying to build …
I wish in future world more than few ppl will have time, skills and ininciative to build telescopes and aerocrafts, automatic machines and radios, various instruments and stuff for helping fellow humans to avoid being justified murderers … I am not very interested in forcing everyone into endless LARP about stone age … or even just some 1850 version of it.
but who asks me! (rhetorich.)
Again, my problem not in “good, non-violent farm life for all as possibility” but that a lot of (fabricated?) historical memory sharply drags us into very replay of bad situation that helped to create current crisis … you might ditch techbros, even as back in time as those popular greek dudes, but please think twice about ditching tech itself, in light of real relations humans tended to have with The World (heavy hint: natural leather is someone’s skin. probably ok to take from dead body, but … this is NOT how humans usually behaved, yeah? too motivated to take whatever they can … and postrationalize it. or like, dolphin teeth as currency .. yeah.))
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After reading this, I would REALLY like to read your opinion on my thoughts about “The city reboot for 2070 that we should start TODAY”:
Part 1: https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/the-city-reboot-for-2070-that-we
Part 2: https://mfioretti.substack.com/p/the-city-reboot-for-2070-that-we-122
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Well done thinking all this through! But there are still at least two core problems.
1) We have no time left. All of this, by your own estimation, needed to start a while ago. But it’s worse than that… It needed to be done before you were born. We are in the middle of biophysical collapse now. What is not built now will not be built because we now have to spend so much on remediation, using more and more limited resources to merely stay alive, not adapt to new conditions. Moreover, all the elements of collapse — heat waves, atmospheric rivers, pressure domes, polluted and increasingly saline water supplies, increasing severity of storms and fires, increasing costs of transport and energy supplies, decreasing material resource supplies, increasing toxicity in the biophysical systems that support our bodies, and of course sea level rise, which is more a problem of ground water contamination than actual floods — are making cities not only fragile but dangerous places to live. We don’t have the resources or labor ready to resolve any of those existing issues. We are only just now discovering many of those issues… and who knows what else is already baked into our mess-making?
2) There is still the underlying issue with primary production. No city can produce any of its needs, from feeder stocks for 3D printers (which are largely petroleum-based, anyway) to food and water. There are few raw materials within a city and no ways to extract them without removing the city even were there things to extract. There is no energetic path toward producing food in a city, not even vat grown Soylent Green type “nutrition”. There is no way to generate heat without resorting to remotely-derived fuels (except in singular places like Iceland that have access to geothermal flows). There is no way to generate electricity without same. Moreover, there are few existing generating facilities within cities (for good reasons) and no obvious way to build out that infrastructure now. Cities are absolutely dependent on the transport of every last need from outside their boundaries, largely far outside their boundaries. And transport of bulk is currently only possible with large inputs of with fossil fuels. Further, cities also depend on waste streams being removed and processed elsewhere, also transport intensive. Finally, there are few occupations within cities that do not rely on all that transport, never mind all the city bodies that require care and feeding. Yet those occupations do little to care for or feed any bodies. They are mostly centered on creating money and so take away time and resources from creating living systems that do care for and feed bodies. It is hard to see why, in the midst of intense stress, people who have the skills to care for themselves won’t just leave and find someplace where that is possible. (This very exodus has happened hundreds of times in our short 10,000-year period of civilized, citified living arrangements…)
I also have to say that none of this is a problem to be solved. It is all a dilemma to be adapted to. We need to change our relationship to the world we depend upon. If that is addressed, or even much considered, it quickly becomes apparent that cities are the wrong way to go about living. Being surrounded by the human-built world negatively affects our ability to think. It makes things like “mini-nuclear reactors” seem a reasonable idea for addressing energy needs, when we don’t currently have such things at scale and have no possible plan to deal with the waste so that it is not increasing toxicity in the world our bodies depend upon. When we put the actual world at the forefront of any plan, cities fail.
I wish there were other ways… but cities simply aren’t viable social arrangements for living beings.
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Hi Eliza, and thanks for your feedback. I hope to write more on Substack about this issue, including a more complete reply to your comments. Here, I would just like to clarify that:
1, about “the underlying issue with primary production. No city can produce any of its needs…”: that’s true, but I never thought or wrote that cities could ever be 100% self-sufficient. For brevity, here I just add that cities could produce not all, but many more finished products than today via glocal (global/local) on-demand manufacturing and repair. There is tons of literature about this, the REAL obstacle is political, as it is a wholly different economic system that consumes much less.
2, about time: yes, doing the right things 20/30/40/50… years ago would have made things much better today, but here we are. So, even a mere reduction of the harm is way, way, way better than leaving things go to hell, that’s my point in making certain proposals. I know they wouldn’t cancel pain.
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See, the thing about primary production is that we have to TRANSPORT all the stuff to the cities. We currently have no way to transport bulky things that do not rely on fossil fuels. Then, we have to transport all the waste back out. Again, bulk. And the key is that this “bulk” is what we need to support our bodies, not “products”. Food, raw materials for building and maintaining shelter, fuel for heating and electricity. Further, there is no non-intermittent energy source in cities either, except in very few places. And nothing can create the heat to make or recycle things like glass, steel and concrete except fossil fuels. So, what are these city people going to be doing while they are waiting for food and shelter to appear? I doubt anyone is going to wait around for this transition now that biophysical collapse and resource depletion are upon us. Note what happened in COVID, especially in places like India where basic human skills are still remembered.
Which feeds into why it needed to be done by now if we wanted to save cities from ourselves. Sure, we still need to do many things EVERYWHERE, but doesn’t it make more sense to use our resources to build something that will last?
And finally, on resources… how much longer is it likely that those places with resources are going to allow foreigners to extract them? How long will they tolerate dealing with the destruction and toxicity left behind by extractive economics? How long is anybody going to do those dangerous and not-particularly-rewarding jobs?
Take the Navajo Reservation, the place where a not-inconsequential percentage of uranium deposits are located. The Navajo are no longer giving away mineral rights. They are barely allowing any mining at all. And they are making industry pay for clean-up — which makes mining uranium uneconomic.
The places where stuff exists are not benefiting under our current system. They are enduring vast destruction. As we lose the ability to coerce these places, they will put a halt to cheap extraction. Perhaps not even allow extraction, but keep those resources for local use, if used at all.
Now, look at the map of resource locations. Do any of those places lend themselves to foreign city use? Local city use? City use at all? Repeat that mapping exercise for resource processing. Then repeat once more for waste processing and storage/reuse/disposal.
This is a map of a soon-to-be worthless territory… in terms of our cultural production anyway… Can’t see anyone sticking around in such a place.
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