this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
59 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
22941 readers
301 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nationalise all polluting industries, decouple them from the profit motive and public investment, decarbonise as much as possible
Shift production so that it's as sustainable, localised, and decommodified as possible. Meet the needs of the people and empower them to fulfill those things
Massive investment in mass transit, bike infrastructure, and subsidies for non-car transportation.
Protect and expand existing natural areas, overfund the agencies dedicated to preserving them
Invest in rural communities to encourage a more even population distribution
Focus on high density urban development with biodiverse parks and urban forests. Every city should be a garden city.
Shift the military's priority from warfare to climate resiliency. Turn it into a job corps that builds sustainable infrastructure
Completely subsidise education in fields that promote climate resiliency and recovery from natural disasters, encourage climate change awareness at the primary/secondary school levels.
Shoot every billionaire in the stomach and leave them outside the city limits
Encourage artistic movements like art nouveau to promote a cultural reverence for nature, artisanal labour, and home craftsmanship. Encourage homesteading and gardening to create a more robust and local food supply.
Make this #1 and I'll give my life to this project
High density cities are ideal for resource consumption, but commuting out of one to do agricultural work from sunrise to sunset isn't ideal. Part of the antithesis between town and country is that rural communities are so underdeveloped that nobody would want to live there and those who do are subject to additional alienation. Agriculture is something that a single digit percentage of the population already born into it does. I go ten miles outside of my current city and there are suddenly no bike paths, no libraries, no decent schools, and no quality internet/water/power. There are just massive cattle ranches and corn farms that pay minimum wage. By investing in those communities and making them livable, I want to expand who participates in food production and reduce the land consolidation under a few ranching/farming businesses who only have an incentive to deplete the land because the scale of their production is so industrialised.
One important angle of this issue is that people in cities don't feel a direct connection to nature or natural production. They'll eat bananas in December without thinking of the cost of a 10 cent banana, and the supply side responds by always ensuring there are bananas in December regardless of the impact on those communities growing them. I want a society in which most people have some kind of direct connection to nature which depends on their stewardship of it.
Surely it's better to collectivise the farms and reduce the number of people working in rural areas as much as possible? Sure, a connection to nature is nice, but fundamentally, the reason that people in cities are so much more efficient is they don't need or want to travel long distances and you can centralise utilities and resource distribution as a result.
Moving as many people out of rural areas as physically possible also makes reintroducing wilderness much more viable. If we can eliminate animal agriculture and rural settlements, we can free up a lot of space for actual natural habits for native wildlife.
Alternatively I like the Soviet system that was described in This Soviet World: https://comlib.encryptionin.space/lib/html/this-soviet-world/1gylc41d_files/chapter10.xhtml
Large farm collectives where everyone is engaged in science and communicating with each other. Every farmer becomes a participant in one project that's centrally planned. Perfectly acceptable as well, challenges part of the alienation Marx described. That's still industrialised production though. Even if the cotton is grown on a collective the Aral Sea drains to supply that collective water. If the industrial dairy next to the nearest rural community was a co-op, it'd still poison the water there all the same. All of our eggs still get put in a handful of baskets during an era of more frequent natural disasters while the dang cityfolk still get to make commodity fetishes out of the food they have no connection to.
As a counter-example to that, my city is the rudimentary liberal form of what I personally want. The core is a biodiverse urban forest with 60~ parks connected by biking trails. If I ride my bike down the trail 5 minutes, I come to a CSA where I can buy fresh vegetables and volunteer since I don't have the lawn to garden myself. If I go in the other direction, urban homesteads and plant nurseries extend for the length of the city. The worm farm is next to the therapy horses and a few houses down from the vegetable farm that accepts foodstamps. At the edge of that my partner's father has turned his lawn into an orchard while his neighbour runs a nursery. I want people in general to have that kind of primary connection to the land, like the medieval European culture of feast days tied to the seasons and yeomen farmers making things for their direct community. That's their personal self-sufficiency, direct connection to science and nature, and understanding of how complex crop production is when they go to a grocery. I want a high density core surrounded by homesteads surrounded by collective farms surrounded by wilderness areas with train access to all of them.
edit: Also by "flatten the population distribution" I don't mean it in as extreme a sense as Engels did. Those agricultural communities are small by default and forcibly moving people into them won't help. I just mean investing in those communities so that they have the same basic services as urban ones. Crime accurately described every rural community near me in her reply, including the one I lived in just 10 miles outside my current city: https://hexbear.net/comment/5805944 . Despite food production being the main industry, it was effectively a food desert. I couldn't afford decent housing because it was all detached single-family homes. My water was poisoned by the industrial dairy next door that I didn't profit from. The only local library is one room while the cultural outlets consist of evangelical churches that you can only reach by car. Now they've built a single high school, but otherwise you have to do a 10+ mile drive on sketchy roads to go to primary or post-secondary education. There isn't a single park or bus to get to the wilderness areas 15 minutes away. I think all of those need to change regardless of the agricultural model because those things breed reactionary resentment of the cities they supply. Living in those communities shouldn't be an immediate downgrade to half a century ago.
Switzerland is an example of great rail infrastructure for rural areas. There are bus services to nearly every town, even if it only has 100 people. The rail services also stretch deep out into the countryside, with interurbans and rural rail lines servicing many small towns. This allows people to live in the countryside car-lite or car-free.
Switzerland is still quite densely populated even in rural areas though, a lot of the land area is not inhabitable and even with that included, it's almost eight times denser than the US and twice as dense as France.
I live in a rural farming town, population has always been <1k people, flyover state, about an hour by car to the nearest city. Everything is walkable. We used to have passenger rail service before they dug up the tracks, and there's rail lines still operating near by that wouldn't be too hard to hook up to. Having rail infrastructure is good in general since quite a lot of food is grown here and needs to be distributed out either way. Seems not-terribly-complicated to use the same rail infrastructure to bring goods in and move people to/from the city.
In order to make the town more appealing so people didn't need or want to leave it as frequently (thereby reducing carbon footprints here), you'd need to add healthcare (doctor, dentist, optometrist, pharmacist, etc or one person who can do the basics of most/all of it plus some staff to support them), re-open the school that got shut down by libertarian experiments so kids didn't need to go to a neighboring town for education every day, and reduce the cost of groceries in town (which is literally 2x as expensive as in the city). Some version of a food truck schedule or other rotating restaurant situation would be good too for more variety (the only place that serves food is the bar which only does artery-clogging fried stuff and meat). You'd also need to add more stuff to do and places to hang out besides churches — there's a park and a walking trail and a basketball court, but it's pretty boring otherwise.