Planning the Next Great Migration

I wish to make another brief digression from the book text to comment on a current issue. Paul A. London wrote a column in 2021 about the Republican “war against cities,” which I cited in my last post. He noted that the cultural phenomenon of rural hostility towards diverse, wealth-generating cities has a long history (as does the opposite phenomenon of urban contempt towards rural areas). At the moment, the Republican Party is deliberately using its power to make life harder for urbanites, “especially,” London says, those in Blue regions “that vote for Democrats and have large minority populations.”

London mentioned anti-urban federal tax policy changes as an example of the “war on cities.” He might also have mentioned the effective nullification by conservative judges of the Voting Rights Act and acceptance of vote-suppressing measures that hit more populous counties harder. But these official acts are just meant to make city residents poorer and more voiceless in state legislatures. They wouldn’t go so far as to seek to put urbanites’ lives at risk, as extreme factional polarization encourages, right? Well, I’m afraid that can no longer be counted on.

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: