Here’s another digression. In today’s Grauniad, there’s an ominous story about the state of water use in a less-discussed part of the Southwest. Take a quick guess: what do you think is the fastest-growing city in the United States?
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I’m continuing to skip around in presenting text from my book. Since I haven’t yet been able to post it as a free PDF, I do want to make all of the text (modified for Internet) available. However, I want to skip over some of my grim introductory discussion of the political collapse of the United States in order to get faster into the most important part, which is, if you can’t stay where you are, where should you go? So the following text presupposes some argument to the effect that we’re on the verge of a civil war and the breakup of the Union may follow, and some discussion of others’ views of the geographic divisions in American culture. I will go back to those topics at some point.
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I mentioned last week my desire to talk back to Eliza Daley’s essay about reruralization, reprinted on Resilience.org. (If you’re reading this, you almost certainly know about Resilience.org, but if not, it’s a very interesting site.) Daley’s been writing for a while about creating a sustainable future and I have a lot of respect for many of her perspectives. So let me start by enumerating the very important major points on which I agree with her:
1. It certainly does not make sense to try to attain sustainability by getting as many potentially displaced people as possible to move into already oversized cities.
2. As the future progresses, the decline of affordable fossil fuels will create an increasing need to reduce the energy put into food production, in terms of calories burned per calorie of food obtained. This will presumably entail more reliance on human labor.
3. Long-term transport, especially of refrigerated foods, will also become harder to afford, making it sensible for more consumers to live closer to agriculturally productive areas. Growing perishable foods hydroponically or by other hi-tech means in urban areas will be too resource-intensive to substitute at a large scale.
4. Many urbanites have unreasonable prejudices against both rural culture and the physical conditions of rural living that are not fully centered in reality. On the other hand, we also agree that rural society includes a significant contingent of “obnoxious young men ... with their enormous trucks and their neck beards and their assault rifles and their flaming insecurities,” and that these might not be the greatest neighbors for some kinds of people.
However, she also makes some assertions with which I strongly disagree:
1. “[H]umans have generally not grown food in urban environments.”
2. “Loud folks” who do not want to become some type of farmworker (more on that soon) are lazy, spoiled urbanites. They “don’t want ... to work.” They “don’t want ... to live without ... someone else doing most of their body’s work.” If you “like to eat,” you should have to do farm labor, because “If you are not doing this work for yourself, someone else has to do it for you.”
3. “If urban areas can’t sustainably feed us, then billions of people need to move. Now.”
Let me address each of these in turn:
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To further my desire to both acknowledge and dispute Eliza Daley’s recent essay on ruralization (mentioned in a previous post), I want to wrap up my thoughts about the unsustainability of our society and economy. If you keep reading you will see me argue repeatedly that giant cities should be avoided, or possibly departed if you already live there, in favor of smaller cities. Partly this is because their citizens are often gerrymandered out of political influence, but partly it is because I think big cities are inherently problematic. Here I’m skipping ahead a bit to explain why I think so.
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In my last post, I summarized Joseph Tainter’s view of the collapse of numerous historical civilizations. His conclusion that complex powerful societies continue to add complexity until its net benefits become negative, which then leads to rapid decomplexification or “collapse,” is surely oversimplified as a single universal explanation, but also surely not irrelevant. We should, therefore, think about the implications for our own, uniquely hypercomplex society.
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I’ve previously posted remarks on the most urgent threat we face, climate change, and on the Limits to Growth analyses that convincingly argue that our growth-centered industrial society would eventually be forced into decline by some other problem, if not by climate change. But there is a third tier of threat: the possibility that all large, complex civilizations, even lacking industrialization, inherently tend to become unstable and at risk of collapse. Let’s touch on that briefly.
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Eliza Daley has just posted an interesting essay, reprinted on Resilience.org, that I’d like to both recommend and talk back to. Since her view of the situation in overlarge cities and the need for deurbanization is tangential to mine, I’d first like to hop back to the topic of unsustainability and post a few more sections of my general view of the problems our society is facing. Climate change is the most urgent, because in some places it’s already bad and heading rapidly towards disastrous. However, it turns out that this is just a special case of a larger phenomenon—what I call Tier 2 collapse—which says that a society built on growth, like ours, must eventually find some consequence of its way of life putting the squeeze on it. The people who have examined this most rationally believe that even if there was no such thing as climate change—or ocean acidification—decline in the relatively near future would still be unavoidable under any business-as-usual model. Here’s a brief summary of their conclusions.
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As we will see, the entire world is facing problems due to the collision of skyrocketing population and consumption with falling global resources and increasing pollution costs. Many parts of the U.S. will suffer directly from climate change, but even the lucky places that see relatively little climate disruption will find their economic arrangements more and more affected by what is happening to everyone else. Thus, there are no really safe zones.
However, there are definitely less safe zones. My view of these is informed by three major sources: The U.S. Global Change Research Program’s (2018) Climate Report, John W. Day and Charles Hall’s (2016) analysis of regional economic dependencies and climate effects on water and sea level in America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions, and Julie Kurtz and colleagues’ (2020) present-day foodshed mapping, which analyzed how possible it was for America’s urban centers to be fed by the farmland of the surrounding region. These sources generally point in the same directions. While the latter two suggest that any large, densely populated urban areas are questionably sustainable, three regions are particularly problematic due to the severity of the problems they will face and the huge numbers of people involved. These are the Southwest, southern Florida, and the highly urbanized eastern coasts. Unfortunately, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau (2021), all of these regions are continuing to grow in population. All of them are sure to see serious disruptions, but the Southwest is going to be first. In fact, it has passed its tipping point into crisis and the disasters are already beginning.
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