Deconstructing "Urban vs. Rural Sustainability"
When Urban
vs. Rural Sustainability by Toby Hemenway started making the
rounds on the internet a year ago, I thought that the article
had a lot of shortcomings. But I was too busy illustrating Tools
for Gridcrash to craft a response. Now, after conferring with
a third generation organic family farmer for further insights
into rural life, I'm going to share some of my thoughts and responses.
--Aric McBay
Click here to read an extra note about
this article added on January 22.
Overall, the main point of Hemenway's article seems to be that
if a major industrial crash occurred "the cities may be unpleasant,"
but that "the countryside may be far worse off." I'm
certainly willing to engage in a discussion about that point,
but in this case I think that Hemenway's arguments are based on
a projection of his own personal and anecdotal experiences with
country living on society at large, and on some serious misconceptions
about the sustainability of the modern city. If his article was
only a series of anecdotes about his own experiences with living
in the country and the city, I wouldn't bother to respond to it.
But I feel obligated to because many people don't seem to be seriously
questioning the premises that lead him to suggest city in general
is a better place to be in a hard crash.
First of all, Hemenway describes difficulties he had with country
living, including a lack of common ground with and conflicts between
his neighbours, trouble getting enough water, manure and wood
chips for his garden, and "watery beer". These problems
are all things can be solved by planning ahead if you are planning
to move out into the country from the city. Don't move to a place
where you won't get along with the neighbours, or where you feel
threatened by them. Hemenway's implication by generalization is
that all rural people are uncultured and violent, which is simply
not the case, but it is a common stereotype held by privileged
suburbanites. I'm sure that in some rural places there are many
people I wouldn't get along with or would feel threatened by,
and in some places there aren't. (When I was biking across southern
Saskatchewan I came across some of the nicest strangers I've ever
met.) I'm also sure that the same goes for cities. It's all a
matter of choosing a place that works for you ahead of time. If
you don't do that, you can't blame it on all rural people.
And the same goes for planning your garden and land so that you
can get enough water and manure without importing it. That's a
precondition for sustainability. As Hemenway's problems progressed;
Slowly a mild paranoia set in. I started to
wonder whether, if the Big Crash came, I was really in the right
place. We had the best garden for miles around, and everyone knew
it. If law broke down, wasn’t there more than a chance that
my next door neighbor, a gun-selling meth dealer and felon, might
just shoot me for all that food?
My question is, are the police in the city any less likely to
take that food from you by force, as "taxes" if there
is a major shortage of food? And do you think that if you resisted
them they would not harm you to get it? In New Orleans, police
took food and water from starving refugees,
and that emergency was really quite brief by comparison to a permanent
collapse.
Who is a larger threat, one armed person, or a large, trained,
organized and extremely well-armed group? And who are you more
likely to win over to your side, a neighbour with whom you can
share food, skills and tools? Or a large group of psychological
conditioned people trained in allegiance to the state? And besides,
armed neighbours are abundant in cities, too, and in a shortage
almost anything can be used as a weapon.
My farmer friend points out that even though doing activism in
rural areas can be harder, it can also be more rewarding.
I began to sense the outlines of a pattern
that replicated one in society at large. We have the technical
means to feed, clothe, and house all humanity. But legions starve
because we have not learned to tolerate and support one another.
People’s real problems are not technical, they are social
and political. Down in Douglas County, I’d solved most of
the technical problems for our own personal survival, but the
social hurdles to true security were staring me in the face.
This is isn't directly related to the main point of the article,
but a need to mention it. Firstly, the reason so many people are
starving doesn't have anything to do with the fact that ordinary
people aren't "tolerating" each other. Rather, as Anuradha
Mittal, codirector of the Institute
for Food and Development Policy, observes it has nothing to
do with tolerance and everything to do with the
exploitation of the "third world" by "first world" governments
and corporations.
Secondly, I would say that without the cheap energy of this brief
oil age the technical problems of sustainable food, clothing,
and housing for close to seven billion humans are not
actually solved at all.
Hemenway continues:
So we have moved to Portland, and into the
heart of town. We love it. The first of many good omens was the
bio-diesel Mercedes across the street sporting a Kucinich sticker.
And it’s a pleasure to be within walking distance of a bookstore,
good coffee, and Ben and Jerry’s.
If having a Mercedes (biodiesel or otherwise) and easy access
to Ben and Jerry's ice cream are among your main considerations,
you may want to rethink your priorities in light of the full implications
and realities of peak oil and industrial collapse. (See further
readings.)
Moreover, just because you have the same taste in ice cream doesn't
mean that you'll get along with people in a really tough situation.
The Mercedes drivers could be just as cutthroat as the meth dealers
if there was no food, and instead of just the one neighbour there
would be thousands of them within the same radius. Hemenway seems
to conclude that this problem is solved by his generous neighbours'
fruit trees:
During the first few days in the city I would
stand on the back porch, eyeing our yard with permaculture dreams
in my head. The sole tree is a sprawling European prune plum.
Other than that, the yard is a blank slate, dominated by a brick
patio, a lawn, and an old dog run. And it’s small. I wondered
how I would I fit all my favorite fruit trees in that tiny space.
The answer soon came. The plum tree straddles
the fence we share with our neighbor Johnny, who has lived next
door for 55 years. One day, on opposite sides of the fence, Johnny
and I were gathering a small fraction of the branch-bending loads
of plums when he called out, “Do you like figs?” I
said I did, and soon a tub of black mission figs wobbled over
the fence toward me.
But fruit trees without other foods cannot provide a healthy
diet (excessive fruit consumption can cause chronic diarrhea).
And would his neighbours really be any more eager to share in
a tough spot than rural people if they didn't have enough food
for families? Hemenway decides that at least his urban neighbours
have a lower consumption than his former rural neighbours:
In the city, an equal group of twelve families
use 10% of the road, wire, and pipe needed in my old neighborhood.
Many neighbors bus or bike to work, or at worst, drive single-digit
mileages. [...]
This is not the place to go deeply into the
question of whether cities are more sustainable than contemporary
American country life, but at each point where I delve into the
issues, I find suggestions that urbanites have a smaller ecological
footprint per capita.
In the current situation that might be true for some people in
rural areas, although I think that the consumption of farmers
is a subset of the consumption urban eaters, since that consumption
is required to make the food they eat. So really, the ecological
footprint of the farmer should be at least partly divided up between
all of the people who eat the food they grow.
But we aren't talking about the current situation, we're talking
about collapse. And in collapse the main concerns are things like
food, water, and energy (probably in the form of wood) for heating
and cooking. All of those things are far, far more abundant in
the country than in the city, both in absolute terms and per capita.
So in that case it is the city which unquestionably has the longest
supply chain to get essentials.
And it doesn't matter how many miles of cable there are between
you and the power plant if the power plant isn't producing or
any electricity. Or if there is a dramatic shortage of electricity,
it would only be available to the very rich anyway.
Besides, this problem is addressed by having fairly dense but
small settlements from place to place, like ecovillages. I'm not
aware of anyone suggesting that we live solitary lives in farmhouses
miles apart as a solution for energy or ecological issues. Moving
to the country with a group of other people you know and trust
would improve security and loneliness issues.
Hemenway writes that market forces will ensure that city continues
to be in better shape:
Sociologists Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford
have each noted that during the Depression and other hard times,
urban residents have generally fared better than ruralites. The
causes mainly boil down to market forces and simple physics. Since
most of the population lives in or near cities, when goods are
scarce the greater demand, density, and economic power in the
cities directs resources to them. Shipping hubs are mostly in
cities, so trucks are emptied before they get out of town.
Even those supply trucks have to travel across the countryside
between cities, so what is stopping Hemenway's apparently gun-happy
neighbours from taking supplies from those trucks in transit if
things are so desperate that they would shoot him for food? And
supply trucks weren't very effective at dealing with the situation
in New Orleans -- how would they deal with shortages of food and
failure of infrastructure on a much larger scale?
And again, if the economy broke down severely you wouldn't want
to put to much of your hope in market forces. I should also note
that Lewis Mumford was a major proponent of the decentralization
of cities and infrastructure. ("Anything like an adequate
answer [to the problem of overlarge cities] does not merely demand
limitation: it also requires a new method of reorganizing and
redistributing the population, when it expands beyond the desired
norm—decentralization and regional federation." Lewis
Mumford, The City in History.) Hemenway continues:
In the Depression, farmers initially had the
advantage of being able to feed themselves. But they soon ran
out of other supplies: coal to run forges to fix machinery, fertilizer,
medicine, clothing, and almost every other non-food item. Without
those, they couldn’t grow food. Farmers who could still
do business with cities survived. Those too remote or obstinate
blew away with the Kansas dust.
If we're concerned about "urban and rural sustainability,"
we should probably not be terribly worried about importing coal
and fertilizer. Coal is finite in supply and fertilizer requires
massive quantities of energy to synthesize, and so neither of
those are even remotely sustainable wherever you are. Farms that
were sustainable in the first place wouldn't suffer from those
problems.
And although it's very poetic to say that the farmers "blew
away with the Kansas dust" it's terribly inaccurate. Firstly,
according to Overshoot:
The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William Catton
there was a net movement of a million people into the countryside
in the US during the Depression. So obviously it wasn't that unappealing.
[Read source] Secondly, farmers didn't just
passively disappear. During the Depression farm foreclosure notices
on mortgages were delivered by the Sheriff, so uncooperative farmers
could be removed from the land at gunpoint if need be. The Secretary
of the Treasury advised the President to "liquidate the farmers"
to deal with the Depression. The situation did indeed become desperate
for many farmers, like almost everyone else, and farmers became
more and more agitated. In 1933 the New York World-Telegram observed:
"Americans are slow to understand that actual revolution
already exists in the farm belt." Farmers began to blockade
roads and engage in "Farmers' Strikes" to raise awareness
about their situation. In response, local businessmen would hire
goons to kill the farmers. So in a sense, Hemenway was right;
obstinate farmers were blown away, in a morbid manner
of speaking. [I've referred to Robert Goldston's book The
Great Depression: The United States in the Thirties for more
information in this section.]
Today the situation for farmers has worsened.
Few farmers grow their own food. Agribusiness has made them utterly
dependent on chemicals and other shipped-in products. The main
lack of cities compared to farms is food-growing, but farms lack
nearly everything else—and most of that comes from cities.
It's probably more accurate to say that many things come via
cities, since the raw materials for chemicals and the like come
from the countryside. But that's beside the point, because synthetic
fertilizers and other chemicals are unsustainable and energy-demanding,
so they won't be available to city inhabitants either.
I live in Ontario, Canada, so decided to see how many of the
things I use on a daily basis come from Toronto, the nearest major
city.
The telephone is from China, and so is my computer mouse and
keyboard, and the lamps and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. The
cup I'm drinking water out of is from Thailand. The patch kit
I just used to repair my bike tire is from Taiwan. My clothes,
though all second hand? Sweater is from Hong Kong, teeshirt is
from Haiti, my pants, underwear, hat and shoes are from China.
The spices I cooked lunch with and the tea I had after were all
from India. The duct tape is from Argentina, and the packing tape
is from Taiwan. My scissors are from Japan. In fact, the only
things that came from within three thousand kilometers were the
potatoes, carrots and canned tomatoes I had for lunch. And I grew
those myself, in my rural vegetable garden.
Most manufacturing of everyday products doesn't happen in US
cities, it happens overseas in places like India and China and
Singapore. (Does that mean my best bet to survive Peak Oil is
to move to Beijing?)
It's not the 1930s anymore. American cities not only lack food,
but they also lack the manufacturing that Hemenway suggests would
give them an advantage.
Concluding his section on the city, Hemenway writes:
Setting aside for the moment the all-important
issue of social and political cohesion, for cities to survive
a peak-oil crash, the critical necessity is for them to learn
to grow food.
The problem is that even if they learn to grow their
own food, there simply isn't enough soil and water in a large
urban centre to grow food for even a tiny fraction of that population.
So either most of the people will die or they will move to rural
or near-rural areas anyway.
For country people to survive, inhabitants
will need to provide nearly every single other essential good
for themselves.
As I hope looking at the countries of origins for various products
illustrates, city people in the US and most of the industrialized
work will also have to provide those goods for themselves in the
event of a serious crash.
Now, I'm not saying that modern rural life in north america is
sustainable. It isn't, and not by a long shot. But to say that
cities are more sustainable in a collapse context is simply a
fantasy. There are some advantages to cities, or towns at least,
in some situations (see my discussion of security
issues, for instance). But we can't extrapolate from one person's
anecdotal experience and project that pattern onto the entire
population, especially considering that Portland is a uniquely
green and liberal city.
If we do that, I worry that some people may make very bad or
dangerous decisions.
Where ever you plan to live, I encourage you to consider some
of the problems that Hemenway had. Can you live in place where
you trust you neighbours? Where you can get enough water? Where
you have enough land to grow food? Whether we live in a town or
not, those are crucial questions to answer.
A couple of people reading my article Deconstructing
'Urban vs. Rural Sustainability' seemed to conclude that I'm
absolutely and universally opposed to living in cities or suburbs
during collapse. That's not the case. My concern was debunking
the idea that rural places were doomed to "blow away like
dust," not to say that all cities or suburbs are a horrible
place to be in collapse. I think that many of them will be, eventually,
but that isn't the point of this article. I actually do work to
create and maintain community gardens in cities and I think there
are definitely some compelling reasons to consider living in cities
and suburbs during collapse -- although many of my reasons for
doing so are somewhat different then Hemenway's. I'm working on
an essay now that will explore some of those reasons and look
at the urban/rural/wilderness continuum in a collapse context.
Here is the text for my source of that from William R. Catton's
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change:
The fiscal collapse had an even more important
implication than this for our ecological understanding of the
human predicament. That implication appears in the generalized
Depression that followed. Consider the farm population in America.
Like almost everyone else, farm families were compelled, by the
repercussions of bank failures and the ramifications of general
panic, to cut their consumer expenditures. Farmers also often
had to allow their land, their buildings, and their equipment
to deteriorate for lack of money to pay for maintenance and repairs.
Many farms were encumbered by mortgages—mortgages which
were foreclosed by banks that now desperately needed the payments
farmers could not afford to make. (Bank failures were even more
common in rural regions than in major cities.) In spite of all
these difficulties, however, the farm population in America ceased
declining (as it had been doing) and increased between 1929 and
1933 by more than a million. The long-term trend of movement out
of farm niches and into urban niches was reversed during the Great
Depression.
Niches everywhere were being constricted by
the Depression. However, the urbanizing trend that had been occurring
as a result of industrial growth in the cities and from elimination
of farm niches by mechanization of agriculture was disrupted by
this economic breakdown. At the heart of the reversal was a simple
fact: the nature of' farming in the 1930s was still such that,
whatever else they had to give up, there was still truth in the
cliche that "the farm family can always eat." Other
(non-flood-producing) occupational groups that now had to fall
back (like the farmers) on carrying capacities of reduced scope
could find themselves in much more dire straits.
If we read it rightly, then, we can see the
differential impact of the Depression upon farm versus non-farm
populations as a cogent indicator of the dependence of the total
population on previously achieved enlargements of the scope of
application of' Liebig's law With breakdown of the mechanisms
of exchange, various segments of a modern nation had to revert
as best they could to living on carrying capacities again limited
by locally least abundant resources, rather than extended by access
to less scarce resources from elsewhere. Although scope reduction
hurt everyone, rural folk had local resources to fall back upon;
urban people, in contrast, had so detached themselves as to have
almost ceased to recognize the indispensability of those resources.
For reasons we shall examine in a moment, economic hard times
hit the farms sooner than they hit the cities, but in the final
scope-reducing crunch the farmers turned out to have an advantage
sufficient to interrupt a clear trend of urbanization.
You can read more of that same chapter here.
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