Hello! You’re one of the only people i follow who is both an antimperialist and a natural scientist so I figured you might have an interesting opinion on this. Lately on here I’ve been seeing a lot of posts talking about how cities are incompatible with the environment and lead only to destruction and the only possible answer is to abolish them. I know you’re not an ecologist but I’d love to know if you have any thoughts on this or have seen this idea around. (I find it a bit strange and confusing but I’m trying to keep an open mind)
Hmm. How do I say this. I think you should probably follow better leftists instead of anarchoprimitivists or Pol Pot.
Now, to be serious, let's talk about this.
This whole idea of a separation between "human" and "nature", as in "cities are incompatible with the environment", is both false and useless. This fallacy comes from the idea of a "pristine nature", that nature was somehow pristine before humans and *civilization* came along, and the only way to protect nature is to expel humans from natural reserves and never let them into them again (very Garden of Eden themes here, and this is not a coincidence). In practice, what this led to in the Americas and Africa and elsewhere, was to displace native people from national parks and reserves and deattach people in general from nature and from their participation on taking care of it, by establishing a line between "polluting, sinful human" and "pristine virgin nature". You will see this idea has taken very, very deep roots in the general public.
It is a wrong idea, of course, not only in a philosophical level but also demonstrably wrong in practice and through the study of ecology. Every part of our planet has been managed (or mismanaged) by human populations. The places you would think that are the most 'pristine', like the Amazon Rainforest, have been extensively managed and cultivated (silviculture) by native populations, and they still have millions of people and yes, even cities, inside them. This is the case for every place in the world since the expansion of Homo sapiens outside of Africa. The environments we see today are not this way despite of human intervention but BECAUSE of human intervention. Even the oceans and Antarctica are regulated by international treaties, which does count as managing those environments.
From my perspective, every human society NEEDS nature and so has created ways to manage those natural resources. There is good management and bad management. But the idea of humans living without nature does not make sense. But you will find that the nature we cherish is also shaped by human actions, and this is an inevitable fact of our existence in the planet. So as long as you want humans to live healthy, happy lives (I have exactly 0 time for misanthropy or nihilism), you have to understand how this works.
So, regarding cities. There is an argument to be made that by having population concentrated in denser cities, this is more friendly to the environment than suburban sprawl. I tend to agree with this. The most extensive damage is caused by expanding agriculture and urban sprawl, if more intensive and dense farms and settlements are pursued, that means more land left to less intensive uses, like say, silviculture or pastoralism, that preserve the vegetation 'matrix' so to say and thus preserve as much biodiversity as possible, while leaving more land to even less intensive uses like natural preserves and traditional ways of living. However, density also means more consumption of resources, you need more technology and energy and resources and very often produce more pollution trying to intensify agriculture and industry. The key is of course to balance this. To make cities that consume less and are more pleasant, with public transportation, which are built with natural features in mind, with agricultural and industrial production adapted to the needs of people instead of overconsumption.
Now that's the nuanced and complex perspective. Let's explore the silly one. What if we indeed "abolished" cities?
Most of the world lives in urban or semi-urban areas, even "towns" are larger than cities in antiquity. Most of the people now do not and cannot produce food for themselves, they get it from agriculture. If all those people were forced out of the cities, it would mean that they would have to get everything by themselves, occupying more land and resources. Can you imagine 8 billion people going to the fields, each one setting their own small farm, trying to produce by themselves? Cities operate as industrial and trade (as in exchanging things, not necessarily capitalism) centers, where production and specialized labor can be concentrated. If everything was just spread all over, it would be a complete mess. And again, I don't think I need to pull out statistics to tell you that most of the 8 billion people in the world live in cities and do not have the skills for farming, let alone subsistence or smallholder farming which is the most backbreaking and complex kind of farming there is. People WOULD die. They WOULD suffer. The environment wouldn't do too well either, as more people spread over a large area means more human pressure on the ecology!
THIS IS A VERY STUPID IDEA.
THE KHMER ROGUE DID THIS. THIS IS HOW MUCH OF A STUPID IDEA IT IS.
Abolishing cities (again, whatever that means) or RETVRNING to a mythiical pre-industrial past is both impossible and would only lead to both human suffering and ecological devastation.
In the Communist Manifesto, there is a mention of erasing the contradictions of the city and the countryside. I will admit that I am not well versed in that theory to comment about this, but the "abolition" of cities does not seem a good way to end this contradiction. If anything, the rebuilding and rethinking of both cities and rural areas to be more harmonious with natural environments, something that can be done, seems to me much more productive and possible that "abolishing" cities or urban civilization.
Now that human civilization has become globalized in a way that neither Marx or anyone else could have thought of, and that we understand ecology and nature not in an intuitive but in a more scientific sense, we even have more of a responsability to protect nature globally. It is thanks to technological and scientific progress that we are able to do this. We should not try to RETVRN to some mythical pre-industrial past. We can rebuild our civilization around ecology.
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