I live in an area not yet entirely trampled by modernity. Wildness still has a waning foothold, here. In late spring, fawns get “the zoomies” in the open space around our house. Newts hunt worms on the driveway when it’s wet out. Douglas squirrels are busy in the trees. Raccoons, possums, and coyotes make reliable nocturnal appearances. A cougar once traipsed through the wooded area between our house and the street. Bears are periodically spotted in the neighborhood. A chorus of frogs provides a soundtrack for summer nights—complemented by the occasional owl. A variety of other birds abound, including bald eagles nesting year after year in trees behind our house. Bats, various pollinators, dragonflies, and garter snakes add to the variety. It’s a real treat and privilege to be at least a witness in this Community of Life.
One downside is that roadkill is not uncommon in this interface region, and wildlife loses the contest every time. Deer, possums, and newts are the most visible to us. Every time I move a smashed newt off our street, I am close to tears and apologize to the departed critter: this should never have happened; you did nothing wrong; you didn’t deserve this end. It’s particularly painful when the flattened newt is on the very driveway that I try keep clear of visually-confusing leaves and other material—and exercise hyper-vigilance when driving through. Even if it was not me whose tires did the deed, I know that I failed in my watch, and feel it deeply. The core fault lies in operating a vehicle across newt habitat: an alien novelty in ecological terms.
Frequent exposure to roadkill prompts my wife to say that this is why we should all live in cities. Leave the hinterlands to wild creatures. It’s selfish to want to live amongst the wildlife. Confine us all to what I might term designated hell-holes, or feed lots.
A clear logic accompanies this argument, and it’s hard for me to efficiently articulate why I am diametrically divergent. It just seems viscerally clear that cities are not “the answer” for dialing back the host of threats perpetrating a sixth mass extinction. In this post, I will attempt to make the case.
End State
Part of what guides my instinct that cities are “not it” is that authentic living—lifestyles of plants and animals (including humans) that have stood the test of deep time—are far more integrated into natural rhythms than anything us modernites experience. A brief excursion into modernity that is rapidly leading toward a sixth mass extinction is a fantastic indicator of what clearly doesn’t work! If humans are to be around for hundreds of thousands of years longer, by definition it can only be in a sustainable mode. And we have loads of clues as to what that looks like—even if those templates are being actively squashed just like the unlucky newts. As is the case for the newts, hunter gatherers are doing nothing wrong at all, but have the unfortunate fate to be in the path of modernity’s maw.
If the far future can’t be urban, the “solution” of everyone moving to cities at best represents the acceleration of a failure mode. And maybe that’s okay—if the plan is a retreat to cities to wither, leaving Earth in peace (which to be clear is not the proposal). In this sense, cities become concentration camps, but this time for those truly guilty of crimes against life.
No Way to Be
That’s not the fantasy version, however. I believe the driving idea is to confine human impact to a few small areas and let “nature” have the rest. The appeal is obvious enough. But as part-and-parcel of doubling-down on a false sense of separation from nature, it ignores the enormous tangle of dependencies that support a city. Already, over 80% of Americans live in cities (and adjoined suburbs). How’s that working out? Is the countryside largely left to the critters, who are breathing a sigh of relief? Is the open space re-wilding? Of course not! The resource footprint does not shrink as a function of how tightly-packed the people happen to be. Logging; mining; clearing land for agriculture; pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer runoff; manufacture and associated pollution; groundwater depletion…all proceed apace no matter where the individuals happen to live.
In fact, one could argue that urban affluence tends to drive up the net effect, as trends would appear to validate. Otherwise extinction rates would be dropping as the world becomes more urban—which is assuredly not how this is all playing out. Besides greater affluence demanding greater resource exploitation, presumably transportation—and its associated material investment as well as roadkill—increases to distribute all those goods from remote areas to the cities.
The situation is similar to that for anarchy: modernity thrives on urbanization—just as it requires the opposite of anarchy (hierarchy). And like anarchy, de-urbanization is no way to run modernity. But the flaw is that modernity is no way to comport ourselves sustainably on this planet. Who cares if cities are the “right” or “best” way to organize modernity. Modernity is an ecocidal monster! Why strive to make the Human Reich operate in its most efficiently destructive manner?
The Clumsy Version
The best I could usually manage on the spot when my wife brought up the idea that we should all live in cities (always while driving, having just passed roadkill)—and without rehashing the larger “modernity is wrong” diatribe, whose welcome has worn—was to point out that the land would still be “utilized” to serve the demands of urban people, and that I don’t trust non-resident corporations operating out of sight to do a better job avoiding atrocities like mowing down deer.
But in truth, our brains simply aren’t up to the task of imagining a counterfactual this extensive and wrestling with all the nuances that add up to some net effect. Would the situation be better due to reduced traffic, or worse because of the impunity that accompanies an out-of-sight-out-of-mind liberty?
If “nature” is wholly relegated to a resource base, commodified by corporations, does it retain as much value? True enough—the previous sentence already captures present reality pretty well, but perhaps the fact that it’s not total is the silver lining.
One other argument I might sometimes use: no movie I’ve ever seen has people swarming into cities in the face of some disaster. The impulse is to flee, and maybe that tells us something fundamental about where we really think we ought to be.
The NIMBY Argument
NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) attitudes serve to make some activities harder—acting as a drag-force on modernity’s ambitions; fettering “progress.” Nuclear waste facilities, sewage treatment plants, clearcut forests, and lately data centers have difficulty overcoming local opposition from residents. Imagine if such residents had long cleared out to the cities, releasing this “brake.” The fact that people harbor some residual care for their immediate environment—even if a faint shadow of the love and intimacy characteristic of foraging bands—translates to at least a modicum of restraint.
Thus, the effectiveness of NIMBY provides an effective argument for why the wild world would likely suffer greater losses if humans abandoned rural areas for cities.
The baseline instinct, here, is that being closer to the wild world offers better protection than making our sense of separation even more extreme by sequestering ourselves to cities. If we’ve made most of that journey already, incurring catastrophic harm in the process, the “answer” isn’t to push toward more complete concentration of even more humans into cities.
But, if one is artificially constrained to imagine the goal being preservation of 8 billion humans in a modern lifestyle, I’m afraid the barks are aimed up the wrong tree. Neither urban nor rural distributions will get that job done. As a thought experiment, what would happen to the “city impulse” in the case of a few million humans on the planet? Is it still preferable for those few million to live in one large city, or can Earth now tolerate wide, ecologically-integrated distribution? We actually know the answer from hundreds-of-thousands of years of precedent. If cities are imagined to “solve” a problem, but that problem is only problematic in the context of enormous numbers of humans, then perhaps the “solution” is better focused on the question of “how many” instead of “where.”
Until human population subsides (as I believe it will soon), let NIMBY continue to offer some protection by having people present and attached to the land.
Views: 1249
Be a proud NIMBY!
I'm also a proud NOPE (Not On Planet Earth).
It may also be that some human presence and interference in natural processes is required to maintain habitat for certain species in the absence of now extinct megafauna. For example, in the UK, the absence of species such as straight tusked elephants and european bison mean that our climax vegetation is now closed canopy woodland, which is worse for biodiversity than what would have existed in the previous interglacial. Only human activity can now open up the canopy as effectively so that other species can flourish.
Is that the case? I thought closed canopy woodland, or rain forest in much of West UK, would be quite good for biodiversity. As well as helping draw down CO2. I assumed that what was once rain forest in the UK would again act as a draw for moist air from the ocean and increase precipitation creating a lush tree system. Whilst no current large animals exist to capitalise on the windfall that would follow humans, perhaps in a few thousand thousand years there might evolve a strange giant or two. I guess it's all speculation, although I'd happily agree to return to the topic in 300,000 years to see who was right.
No one can say for certain, I guess, but certainly there's a lot of evidence that many of our current UK tree species are elephant adapted.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/this-elephant-lived-in-europe-for-700-000-years-could-it-live-there-today-47490
Agree that we can't go back, and also that if humans vanished, the wild wood would take over and develop into some new stable system.
Meanwhile I think the rewilding projects we are seeing might require a bit of hands on management from humans eventually, or they will see a decline in biodiversity as they transition from scrubby fields to closed canopy woodland. I have both on my farm as well as a fair bit of, ahem, totalitarian agriculture, and the scrubby pasture tends to have more biodiversity with many species of birds, insects and wildflowers alongside the trees and scrub.
Interesting! How about the fungi system connecting the tree roots underground; still a vast niche for biodiversity now and into the future, I would think. Do we know whether it is more or less extensive in a closed canopy forest?
I used to live in the SF Bay area, an area with what is perhaps a surprising amount of open space (Tilden Park, Mt Tamalpias, Crystal Springs Reservoir, etc). I would often walk out in these spaces…I remember the smell of the tarweed, the blue and gold flush of poppies and larkspur, the overwhelming sweetness of the madrone forests in bloom… Tilden park restricts traffic on one of its roads, during the time of year when the newts are crossing to mate… If "cities" were restricted to those like San Francisco, where nearly every square inch is devoted to the business of human populations, devoting as much of the remainder as possible to non-human activity, I could, maybe, get into "people in cities only." Unfortunately the term, city, includes those abominations that consist of 'single family housing' developments, spreading across otherwise placid countryside like mange. I would remark, from time to time, passing through these horrors, how often they were named after the natural features that were destroyed by their construction.
I now live in semi-rural western Washington state. The smells are nice, but nothing like the SFBArea…way more open space, but nowhere near as much variety…oh well…
Earth Abides, Canticle for Leibowitz, Ape and Essence, The Handmaid's Tale, Always Coming Home…so many possiblities. Has anyone written a post-apocalypse novel with no humans in it?
Nice article. I think what's missing is the "why?" of cities. What are cities actually for? What is the basis for their existence, and for whom? In the UK, people were forcibly removed from their land and sent to cities. They were, in essence, punishment. Why have they somehow become the most desirable form of living? It's a facade. There is no real reason for cities, other than power, hierarchy and control.
I read an article earlier today about creating resilient urban environments that could withstand 4C of temperature rise. It made no sense at all, and was purely discussing building resilience and climate. They didn't contemplate what 4C actually meant and how supply chains would all have failed long before. Everything was solar panels, vertical farming and stuff, with no obvious thought as to how those would be replaced. He couldn't see that what he was designing was simply a trap.
The part that is the most intriguing, for me, is that very intelligent people with a real understanding of climate change seem to buy into the ideal of cities. They seem to think that they're a workable, sustainable (we must assume) model. What makes people able to put together the complex outcomes of climate change, but then just land on a solution that only solves for that one thing and assume the rest will solve itself? Why do some people stop when they get to questioning electric cars, heat pumps and cities? Why do they stop digging and just make use of nebulous terms like "more sustainable" as a fudge to avoid questioning reality (modernity)? Is it simply a refusal to let go? A stage of grief?
I agree with your conclusion, but I think you may be presenting the case in a misleading way. You say that “already over 80% of Americans live in cities (and adjoining suburbs)”; true, but of course the number of Americans in those suburbs outnumbers those in cities by about 2 to 1. And even within the non-suburban cities, most of the land is suburban, not actually urban. While you are correct that even in urban areas people (especially big meat eaters, rich globetrotters, etc) have large ecological footprints, they are nevertheless many times smaller on average than those of most Americans.
You also write that you believe human population will soon subside. But that is true at least in part because of urbanization! Finally, you write that urban-dwellers are more cut off from the community of life than people in interface or hinterland regions. True, but again, this is in no small part because of suburbanization: between every urban dweller and the hinterland there is usually at least 50-100 miles of suburbs and car-traffic jams separating the one from the other.
But those suburbs serve the city, don't they? I'm in the UK, but I'm guessing it's similar. Suburban areas give families bigger dwellings and bigger lawns to mow in return for being less expensive than urban areas. They are, at their core, commuter areas, drawing people into the city to serve its purpose. It's really irrelevant whether they are classed as part of the city or not, as cities across the world require suburbs for their function.
I'd go further though, and suggest that it is the entire idea of a city that is unsustainable. If there is a genuine belief that humans can and should be separated from "other nature", then this is human supremacy, and will almost certainly lead to the nature part being thought of as a resource to be exploited. As it has. In every city of the world.
Because that's the point: there isn't a single sustainable city on earth, and never has been. The evidence is very clear. Whether an urban area uses less resources than a village (and I suspect this is often just bad accounting*) is irrelevant, it's still an unsustainable model as far as the evidence takes us.
*A bit like the UK claiming that its plastic pollution isn't nearly as bad as that in the place where we ship all our plastic waste to. Or claiming that my regenerated soils are thriving and could feed the world, whilst ignoring the degraded fields that grow the feed for my animals for most of the year. Or claiming our cities are smog free, after deindustrialisation etc etc
I agree with you about that (and with Tom about that). But your point (and Tom’s implied point) about suburbs isn’t fully correct, I think. You say “ I'm in the UK, but I'm guessing it's similar.”. No, it’s not similar: Americas population is vastly more suburban than countries like the UK, and even America’s non-suburban “urban” areas are actually mostly suburban in reality, and far more so than those of countries like the UK. This is part of the reason why North Americans consume several times more oil per capita than British people do, for example. And, while you are correct that urban and suburban areas work together as part of a whole, there are massive differences between, say, urban areas like Hong Kong or Singapore, and suburban regions in most of the US. And not surprisingly, these urban areas have far lower ecological footprints and fertility rates. If, hypothetically, you were to take a city like Los Angeles and give the density of a city like Hong Kong, it would also mean that Angelenos would have far better access to the adjacent countryside than they do currently.
Sorry, I meant that suburbs were similar in that they function as commuter areas, in service to the urban development, although yes their makeup in the US is nothing like the UK. You're right, the ecological footprint is lower in Singapore and Hong Kong, but they still work under the same assumption – that we can separate ourselves from nature, walling ourselves in our urbanities and ship in our needs whilst magically exporting our waste – and their overall ecological footprint far exceeds the boundaries of the city, and is both invisible and unsustainable. There seems to be a line of thought, and it's not what you're saying I don't think, that if we make our cities dense enough, or energy efficient enough, that they could somehow become sustainable. However, the evidence doesn't really back that up. Instead we get the pernicious argument of "more sustainable". The UK city is "more sustainable" than the US, Singapore more than the UK etc. But "more sustainable", in this context, I'd synonymous with "unsustainable", in a similar way that you cannot be more pregnant than someone else.
As far as we can tell, there is no path to sustainability for a city. My view is that the concept is flawed, the entire idea of separation. I could be wrong on that, but it remains to be proven otherwise. The city functions in the same way as the industrialised meat industry, where the horrors of its reality are deliberately obscured from the consumer. That abstraction, to me, is an existential flaw which means the concept of a city could never work.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Yes, I hear your argument..it’s the same as Tom’s argument in the original article here. I agree with it, as I said at the outset. Obviously, any city, now matter how dense or futuristic, seems almost certain to have a high footprint, as compared to how humans have lived for the vast majority of our existence. (Is this 100% certain, as I think Tom has argued? I don’t know, and he doesn’t know either..though I’m happy to acknowledge that his physics expertise gives him a much better chance of guessing the answer than I could).
But I still say that not discussing suburban/urban and America vs Hong Kong (type of differences is misleading. The differences between the two are potentially gargantuan. It’s not just because our footprints here in North America are already at least a handful or two higher than theirs are, but also because their fertility rates are far lower, so that in the relatively short term (a few centuries or millennia, say) the potential footprint differences are potentially far, far, far different. To treat that as just a toss-up, just because we are worried about giving people the wrong idea that urbanization can be a clear road to sustainability, is a ridiculous mistake.
I too have lived in San Francisco, on Bush Street near the entrance to Chinatown. And I lived in Malaysia for 3 years during my service teaching at the National University as a US Peace Corps Volunteer. Malays traditionally live in a 'kampong.' The kampong is a safe protected fenced 'village.' Tigers and elephants were a constant danger when I was there 60 years ago. During a week-long trek in the jungle we woke up one morning to find huge paw prints around the tents. When the world goes totally haywire I suspect that the people of Southeast Asia will continue to be fine but they will probably abandon the crowded cities and return to living sustainably in kampongs and longhouses. Maybe we should do the same.
E.O. Wilson's "Half Earth" lays out in a fairly detailed way how to come to perhaps a middle ground between you and your wife. While I don't think 8 billion people is sustainable, I do think that his ideas might work for a planet with significantly fewer people. (Also, btw, parts of central Pennsylvania are rewilding after a continuing and significant depopulation.)
I don't know if we can even have cities without modernity built upon a foundation of fossil fuels … and you're saying modernity is going to fail… ergo … eventually … when modernity is no longer even an option … we can't have cities even if we want them. People can't eat concrete and asphalt …
I agree with this overall sentiment: we delude ourselves to think we actually have a choice to keep modernity going as long as it pleases us, just as we can't (successfully) decide never to sleep or eat or drink or breathe again, or to motor right through anesthesia unfazed (i.e., free will goes on vacation). Because modernity is fundamentally unsustainable, failure is guaranteed. However, cities accompanied agriculture, so I would mark that as the key enabler, rather than fossil fuels that came much later. No surprise: I believe agriculture to be fundamentally unsustainable as well: just not as in-your-face apparent as fossil fuels, but still ecologically calamitous (based on surplus, positive feedback, exponential, expansionist, soil-depleting properties) on timescales short compared to those relevant to ecology.
For what it's worth … seems like Paul Ehrlich thought the "optimum" human population was 1.5 to 2 billion people , and carried that belief with him looks like almost to his end … see article from 2018 (he died just ~4 months ago) :
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/22/collapse-civilisation-near-certain-decades-population-bomb-paul-ehrlich
So Paul Ehrlich must have believed some form of agriculture could be sustainable for some period of time … 1.5 to 2 billion homo sapiens is still a lot of people , of course
Of course … doesn't mean he was correct about any of it
Fate is gonna fate and future generations will get to experience this themselves and eventually find out I suppose
We are all products of modernity, and thus damaged goods. Those whose formative years aligned with an unending flurry of "progress" may have a harder time shaking an affinity with modern greatness. As future generations see progressively more cracks forming and breaking, the zeal will presumably diminish. In any case, I trust what the actual universe will do far more than notions sprung from brains. 1.5–2 billion is pretty notional, and the universe will be free to ignore.
You continue to make a lot of sense !
It'd be great if more people listened to what you had to say …
Whenever the topic of sustainable living comes up I am reminded of a book titled "The Old Way" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas recording life among the Bushmen of the Kalahari before they had virtually any experience with "advanced" societies and how they were ultimately impacted by modern society.
I doubt one in ten million humans who have their lives from birth in any modern society could survive that lifestyle but I am equally certain that the individuals in that hunter-gatherer society are at least as happy with their lives as any of us.
There is nothing like living on the lands of the Muckleshoot, the Puyallup, and the Duwamish peoples. Cascadia, the bio-region, is in the early stages of looking at some possibilities when the sh.. hits the fan. Whenever that is. Whatever happens then. In the meantime, I’m closing my eyes and enjoying the smells of the Salish Sea. The Cascadia flag is beautiful; they have a passport now. I joined to get both. Seattle.
Interesting. So, behind heading away from the city during some disaster is a call to nature? Say, a collective *Cahokian* instinct?
I am now reading Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp that someone recommended in an earlier post's comment. In it, Hobbe's idea of such "mass panic" to be stemmed by a strict hierarchic order is likened to a kind of civil disorder that would otherwise bring out the worst in human nature: robbery, looting, rioting. I would venture that those may not necessarily be coming from natural inner human properties. Instead, the source could well be the properties of them being, in the first place, subjects to the realities of cities, and the angst building up from it even in periods of relative calm.
I envy you, Tom, that you live so close to nature. I would regularly cook rice and bring it to the far end of the narrow clearing from my abode. This would feed the ants and let them, in turn, observe our silent contract of keeping away from my place. A law between *us-two* acted out, instead of written down.
I recently attended a meeting where they discussed the threats that biogas facilities (Desperate times in the EU indeed) pose to a rural area in northwestern Spain where my mom is from, and if it not were for those that are still living there and organize themselves to prevent such atrocities against nature (and basic thermodynamics) it would be for sure much worse. Apparently the strategy that "grant miners" are using to push forward some of these ridiculous projects is to make a lot of pressure on the most ridiculous project of the bunch to diver attention to slip underneath the most discreet ones (the ones they actually aimed for) and make the local "activists" (as if the active ones dirsputing the status quo were them in the first place) feel they have won by preventing the worst at least. And then, after a couple years, rinse and repeat, of course, and the baseline of what is considered "ridiculous" only moves forward…
Thanks for your posts, it helps keep ourselves touching grass amidst the huge circus the whole modern world has become…
I moved from Michigan to Chicago in the aughts and, while taking bus or train trips back to Detroit, was always blown away by the sheer number of trucks lined up to get into the city, every day, typically extending halfway through Indiana along I-94 (so, quite a ways out). That alone always made me suspicious of the idea that cities are sustainable entities. As for Detroit, having already experienced some aspects of what would be considered collapse, and until the outsiders and investors came in with their much-heralded revival, you could actually live in a place with a lot of access to green space, though I don't know about wildlife, and there was an amazing urban gardening scene. A decade ago a friend of mine bought a city block for less than 10K which only had one standing structure and basically looked almost rural! So, perhaps the label of city, suburb, or rural can be fuzzy, at least in the US and depending on whether the entity is growing or shrinking, and offer unexpected possibilities or roadblocks to ecological footprints, or finding a connection to your land base.
I now live in the outskirts of an overpopulated city in the American South that got even more pricey and crowded during COVID. The conspicuous consumption and frequent travel to get out of the heat that I see here, especially in the downtown area which is only affordable to the rich, would seem to negate any positive impact of housing density (plus most everyone has a car anyways). Not to mention the extractive, tertiary economy jobs (finance, banking, real estate, etc) that these people have in order to support their extravagant lifestyles and insane rents. There's other issues that come with big apartment buildings and housing density that may seem like no big deal til you're living it – crazy/loud/drunk/rude neighbors, roach and bedbug infestations, etc. Where I now live is technically city but more like a cramped suburb and I find it even that very stressful – with the constant noise, construction, leafblowers, etc. I end up behaving ways I wouldn't under more spacious circumstances, I suspect. and though I can't speak for others I would imagine that some do respond to these stressors with additional consumption or retreating into smartphone world!
The linked article comparing cities to CAFOs made me feel better about it, at least (I have the opposite temperament and tendencies as the ideal city dweller, it seems, and reinforced my suspicion that it might be time to move on out….)
>NIMBY continue to offer some protection by having people present and attached to the land.
Do they though ? That's certinly not my.experience.. They often want it, whatever it is…just not where it disturbs them, like most wealthy folks.
As to road kill,.i live in what's described as the road kill capital.of the world, Tasmanian. I ride my bike as much as I can but it's devastating riding past the endless dead native animals, most species a small step from extinction; Quoll, Wombat, Possum, Pademelon, Devil etc
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/offtrack/tasmania-roadkill-capital-of-the-world/7021816
A fair point that the NIMBY people still wants the precious trinkets, but at no hassle to them. Short of a free pass, at least we can say that their resistance to "backyard" installations still does *something* to make unchecked expansion more difficult to carry out. If the countryside was abandoned for city life, that bit of resistance—insufficient as it may be—would vanish with the residents.
And it grieves me to hear about the Tasmanian roadkill epidemic.