The key thing people don’t realize or understand is that hardly any agriculture is sustainable, and even less is restorative. Permaculture is extremely interesting because of that.
The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.
I think nothing will work without some kind of change to the way of life. Urban living has taken people away from the land, so there is this illusion that we don’t have to participate in the ecology. Like water infrastructure, people growing up in cities expect food-on-demand … if you have the money for it.
The idea that if you want to eat an apple means going into the back yard and picking one off the tree is an alien ideas. (Kids think food comes from grocery stores, not from trees). How fresh is that, right off the tree? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like tomatoes on the vine and it misses the point. When I personally harvested an apple and interact with an apple tree in my back yard, I am directly participating in the well-being of the ecology.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-food. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I don't like how you're going after urban living. I can rewrite what you've written, but from an urbanist perspective regarding transportation sustainability:
Rural living has taken people away from one another, so there is an illusion that we don't have to pay the true costs of travel. People growing up in towns expect cars and on-demand access to roads and gasoline and airports... if you have the money for it.
The idea that if you want to go to a friend's house you need to walk or bike there is an alien ideas. (Kids think we travel in cars, not on foot). How simple is that, riding a bike through your neighborhood? Yet, now we have marketing that plays into that illusion, like hybrids and EV cars and "eco-conscious" airlines and it misses the point. When I personally walk, bike, or take the train to my destination, I am directly participating in a sustainable transit network.
There is no way forward for our civilization to “scale” in a way that maintains that illusion of on-demand-travel. It’s how we view the world, and our way of life that needs to change.
People get attached to things, including urban living.
I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish with rewriting it from the perspective of travel. That is pretty much how I feel about travel and transport infrastructure too.
Some cultures attach a lot of importance on travel, associating it with freedom, or mobility (both in the literal sense, and as a metaphor for class mobility). Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel, to explore, to hike the wildernesses or enjoy different urban locale and take full advantage of the transport infrastructure. That doesn’t mean it isn’t an illusion.
I trying to point out that urban doesn't imply disconnected from ecology, jusy like rural doesn't imply connected to ecology.
Walking around my extremely dense city, I see plenty of people growing their own food in their little yards, probably more than I see back in my semirural hometown.
For a while I subscribed to a vegan food delivery service. The food is grown a few towns away and delivered daily by cyclists. There is nothing like that back in my hometown; I'd have to do HelloFresh or something.
Urban living is more sustainable than living in suburban sprawl. Spreading humans around and reducing our density isn't going to make it more sustainable.
>I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish with rewriting it from the perspective of travel. That is pretty much how I feel about travel and transport infrastructure too.
Then you're just a pastoralist and likely a Malthusian, not talking about ecological sustainability at all.
It feels like the argument is upside down. Civilization scaled because increased agricultural productivity allowed a smaller number of farmers to feed the rest, freeing them up to do other things. These people also naturally congregated to cities because that enabled fast exchange of goods and ideas, i.e., it was more "scalable" than having everyone scattered throughout the country.
In the modern world, it also means that cities have lower ecological footprint. Moving people around is much more energy intensive than moving food. Makes more sense to do farming across the country and concentrate the produce onto a small place packed with people.
Not necessarily saying this is a great tradeoff for individuals (who wouldn't want a backyard with an apple tree?) but in a sense, the fact that we're picturing a backyard with an apple tree instead of backbreaking work in the rice paddies throughout summer is a testament to how brutally efficient the modern agriculture is.
Logically that would make a lot of sense, if we were to design things in such a way that products are only shipped to their local urban areas. However, the modern day system has given rise to such absurdities as fruit grown in South America being shipped to Asia for packaging, and then shipped to North America for consumption. It's not that the entire system is amazingly efficient, it's that it's simply been possible because energy has been very cheap this last century. The food system will have to adapt one way or another (and I think we will), but it will probably end up being more human-labor intensive and local.
Relating to energy, one of the coming issues we will need to solve is fertilizer supply. Modern agriculture heavily depends on natural gas (via Haber-Bosch) to juice yields alongside genetic engineering. This isn't great for long-term soil health either, we just haven't been doing it long enough to see the effects of soil depletion.
You might be interested in the book Against the Grain, which argues that people didn't naturally congregate into cities like we have thought for a while.
From the wikipedia:
> Scott then asserts that the reason why hunter-gatherer societies transformed into agro-pastoral societies was due to coercion by the state. He cites research on an archaeological site in Mesopotamia named Abu Hureyra. Scott concurs with other scholars in the field that "'[n]o hunter-gatherers occupying a productive locality with a range of wild foods able to provide for all seasons are likely to have started cultivating their caloric staples willingly.'"
I don't think it is "urban living" so much as just modern living. While people in rural and suburban areas are more likely to have some form of exposure to locally grown produce, they still for the most part live in the same kind of economy as urban areas. I currently live in a suburb surrounded by strawberry farms, avocados, etc. And our grocery stores are just as likely to have strawberries and avocadoes from Mexico.
People in rural areas like where I grew up, might be more likely to have a garden, but most don't, and they still get most of their calories from the grocery store. I grew up on a cattle ranch and while that might give me more "connection" to my food, we still bought a lot of our beef at the grocery store because finishing and butchering a cow is expensive and time consuming and requires lots of long term freezer storage. Today's modern rural family is pretty similar to an urban one except they drive a lot farther to do anything.
One point I would add is that this mostly applies to the "1st world" IMO, because in many parts of the world there is local produce and meat and it's often part of the culture to grow your own (or at least to keep a few chickens and fruit trees). However, yes globally most urban dwellers get their food at the grocery store and really enjoy being able to purchase it for money.
humans have been doing it for 1000's of years. that is a much longer record of sustainable success than anything else we know of.
there isn't any particular reason to think that industrial agriculture will fail any time soon. the worst case scenario is that it becomes more expensive over time. we spend <5% of our GDP on food, so even a 10X increase in raw production cost would be survivable.
we massively over produce food (30% of corn burned as gasoline off the top, another large percentage of soy and corn used as animal feed, huge amounts of waste) and the biggest nutrition problem we have is obesity.
the US has huge amounts of underutilized marginal land simply because there is no reason to use it. we already have way too much food.
Worth drawing a distinction between the farming of the past and the farming of the present. Until the agricultural revolution humans sat right up against the population ceiling- the only reason hunger wasn't the leading cause of death is that disease reliably killed us first. They left fields fallow, and when they grew too much (which they had to if they wanted to feed their families) they depleted the soil and starved. We couldn't do permanent damage because our population was partially governed by it, just like every other animal.
I don't actually disagree with you- infinite growth might not be possible but we haven't even started tapping the lightcone. Fertilizer works, negative effects can be mitigated, and honestly nothing is worth returning to the "sustainable" famine nightmare of the past.
> When you clear a forest in a high-rainfall tropical area, new trees grow up to a height of 15 feet within a year; in a dry area like the Fertile Crescent, regeneration is much slower. And when you add to the equation grazing by sheep and goats, new trees stand little chance. Deforestation led to soil erosion, and irrigation agriculture led to salinization, both by releasing salt buried deep in the ground and by adding salt through irrigation water. After centuries of degradation, areas of Iraq that formerly supported productive irrigation agriculture are today salt pans where nothing grows.
While we're solving for human markets and economies, the unspoken goal is to turn earth's limited resources into thought, whereby some intelligent process achieves the escape velocity to leave this gravity well and proliferate throughout the universe.
I know there are people who see it this way and feel like this. It presumes a couple things:
- that intelligent thought (or in other belief structures, spirit, consciousness, etc) are the only thing of value worth propogating
- that by escaping the gravity well, we can also escape the problems we wrought by bad design.
We’re more likely to carry the problems forward. Our so-called “intelligent thought” have problems built into how we approach the design, so like running away from our shadows, it will come up wherever we go.
And, if we are aware of the bad design, why wouldn’t we just fix it while we’re here on this planet?
Isn’t is interesting that as a species we don’t have a way to understand where are we in our lifecycle? As a human I can understand life stages and where I am relative to other individuals. I can plan my life accordingly and of course there may be unexpected events but on average I know I have maybe 70-100 years to enjoy life.
As a species we have no idea if we peaked or we are in our infancy… one thing that will probably happen is that we too will cease to exist as a whole at some point. I wonder what this does to us as a group, not having that perspective.
> As a species we have no idea if we peaked or we are in our infancy
There are so many possible outcomes.
It can be true that humanity will peak, yet intelligence will continue to grow and expand beyond humans.
Any outcome where humanity is the utmost pinnacle of intelligence likely means that we do not stray beyond our gravity well. That earth-evolved intelligence will never reach the greater galaxy beyond. It falls far short of earth's potential.
I hope humanity is not the peak. There's so much more that lies beyond us. In a greater developmental timeline, we could be just amoebas. That's exciting to contemplate, even though we can barely fathom it.
So what if it was ? I don’t really understand this ultra-intellectual viewpoint.
A planet is just fine being a planet, we don’t need to out glasses on planets and have them reading Shakespeare to make the universe a special place ? I’m sure they will happen on its own anyway if it’s desirable.
In a similar way, an amoeba doesn’t really need intelligence, it just does what it does until it can’t do it anymore and a new one comes a long. Maybe that’s a fine thing and in some ways, it’s own form of intelligence. Doesn’t need to mess with everything and crate ecology crisis for itself.
The way we’re going, the amoebas will likely outlive us and probably any computer systems we produce. So it’s yet to be proven our intellect is really all that valuable longer term.
because fixing things costs money. Even when it saves money. Money is the catalyst that allows anything to happen, and not enough people have enough of it to turn good ideas into good designs into good products.
And flying to another planet that happens to be completely inhospitable is somehow cheaper or easier?
When you realize there are no hospitable planets, besides earth, within our solar system - you will realize there is no escaping the problems we have created here on earth. No, they must be solved, not avoided.
There is no future where any of us alive today, or for many, many generations (dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, if it's even possible) will be capable of traveling to another system with potentially hospitable planets.
That wasn't the comparison I was making. For the record, I'm all for fixing problems, but the OP asked why they were not being solved, so...yeah, money. is it a satisfying and good answer? no. Is it enough of the answer to have explanatory value, I think so.
I would assert a great deal of perceived problems are not being fixed because not everyone agrees they are problems, or agrees to what extent they are problems, or agrees on the solutions.
HN is quite a bubble, and we often form an echo chamber that strongly agrees with itself.
> Besides, how could terraforming Mars be easier than fixing our problems?
We don't need to terraform Mars to our incredibly fine tuned biology. What comes next will evolve beyond our limitations. Humans are a stepping stone. Just a blink of an eye in an infinite time scale.
What? There is no reason to think humans are "a stepping stone," there are plenty of dead-ends in evolution. There's certainly no reason to think that putting biological things on Mars will in any way cause them to evolve into Mars-robust creatures. Evolution is a slow, slow, slow random walk throughout which nearly all conditions have to be nearly-perfect.
Natural selection is a metaheuristic maximizing on the landscape of fitness topology, available energy resources, etc. It relies upon biological constraints, such as existing genes, organs, and biological functions available. It cannot make fantastic leaps quickly that would require significant backtracking.
I'm not suggesting putting biological organisms anywhere. I'm suggesting that at some point in the future an AI will be able to rapidly modify its own substrate independent of biology, metabolic inputs, and genetic inheritance. That it won't be subject to information loss due to death or other physical constraints. That it will much more quickly be able to build support systems for itself to harness energy and raw materials wherever it goes.
Unless we kill ourselves in the near future, these systems will likely emerge and will likely proliferate faster than us. They're not going to be stuck on earth with us. There are abundant energy resources and building materials in the solar system and greater galaxy beyond.
The challenge is finding ways to harvest food reliably and at any meaningful scale.