A naive, pro-urban article

Here's an article by Stewart Brand. It's sort of rambling and poorly-written, in my opinion, jumping from urban density to slumdweller frugality to the economic and cultural superiority of urban life. Basically though I would summarize that it praises the ecological benignness of dense cities vs. less-densely populated areas, and this is the main argument I'm going to take on. It's a valid argument when comparing one city to another, or even when comparing one group of profligate US-style consumers to another. Manhattanites do indeed consume fewer resources per capita than people in a spread-out city like Juneau, Alaska. But in the end, Manhattanites, as all urbanites, live a much less sustainable lifestyle than do rural-dwellers in most of the world.

A big problem of Brand's article is that he conflates the relatively low (when compared with rich world levels) levels of resource consumption of slumdwellers, with the inherent benefits of constructing denser cities. Slumdwellers consume less not because they live closer together than rich world urbanites, but because they are desperately poor and do not have the money to consume more resources. Desperate poverty can hardly be advanced as a realistic recipe for lowering resource use. And I would argue that even given the poverty-derived frugality of slumdwellers, a slumdweller in a given country still consumes more resources than his rural compatriots. I can give the concrete example of my city in one of Colombia's poorest regions. We have our share of miserable hillside slums where people scrape by doing whatever they can to earn a living. They have little money, so they consume little, and hence they produce little waste. But even what little they consume is pure consumption--they aren't growing much food or fiber for themselves. And when our city's slumdwellers buy a bushel of potatoes or some onions, these come in plastic bags, and are shipped in from the surrounding countryside. The people of this countryside, on the other hand, neither consume nor throw away a plastic bag every time they eat potatoes or onions, they don't have their food trucked to them, they eat and use fewer processed, packaged items than their slumdwelling cousins, and they have less access to things like natural gas and water, which means they consume less of these utilities.

So I would insist that in a poor country, rural-dwellers are as frugal, recycling-focused, and resourceful as their urban counterparts, with the added ecological credentials that their organic wastes go back to the land, and they rely little on others to produce their food and their basic necessities. In fact, farmers in a poor country, and even in a wealthy one where farmers use a lot of industrial inputs, essentially subsidize the existence of urbanites with the food they produce. Hence any environmental damage seemingly caused by farmers should really be credited to urbanites as well, because the practices of farmers produce the food that we all rely on.

Rural dwellers have a productive, symbiotic relationship with the natural environment. They are nourished by the land, as they nourish the land. Their work can potentially leave a harmful ecological footprint, but this is not the norm; most farming, by necessity, produces more resources than it consumes, and returns to nature what it takes from it. In the long-term this means that farming doesn't irrevocably draw down the natural capital stored in the form of soil fertility, water, and sunlight. It can in fact add to this natural capital, building soil fertility or improving plant use of water. Even in countries like the US where farmers often deplete the natural resource base in the process of production, this environmental impact must be credited to all people, because it is the consumption of urban and rural alike that drives this depletion.

Urbanites, on the other hand, have an almost purely exploitative relationship with the natural environment. The urbanite's ecological footprint is a result of his consumption, and he returns little benefit to the natural environment. Urbanites can strive to reduce their consumption, but ultimately the urban lifestyle is a net drain on natural resources. City life is always subsidized by the produce of rural dwellers; urbanites consume the produce of the environment without putting anything back. Frankly, from an environmental standpoint, the only useful thing most of us city-dwellers produce in our life is our shit, and even this is often not channeled to a practical use as fertilizer.

Seen in this light, urbanites will almost always come out worse than rural dwellers in terms of ecological impact, because urbanites are responsible for their own consumption plus the ecological effects of the farming that feeds them, while rural dwellers mainly consume what they themselves have produced, and this production and consumption is tied to ecological cycles of regeneration. This is where the thinking of people like Stewart Brand falls way short when he implies that an empty countryside is a more ecologically healthy countryside. This assumes that humans can only consume, only degrade the land, which is patently false. In fact, in rural areas the world over, the more populated zones are more ecologically healthy, because people take better care of the land, and are more reliant on its health for their survival. It is often in the "emptied-out" rural areas where environmental abuses take place, because land is abundant, unproductive, and undervalued, and there are fewer watchdogs to report land misuse.

When he discusses the potential ecological impacts of humans, the author of the article clearly thinks only in terms of efficient "service delivery" and an ecological footprint driven by consumption, while ignoring the fundamental reliance of all humanity on agriculture, and the ecologically regenerative relationship of many rural people with the land. The author betrays this point when he lauds the urbanization-driven change from wood or dried dung for cooking, to diesel generators and grid electricity. This change implies a move from using natural materials with a neutral net carbon effect, to a reliance on fossil or nuclear fuels. Using cooking gas and electricity for one's energy needs certainly has its advantages in terms of health and convenience, but it is undeniably a step towards more, not less, environmental impact.

As for the fantasies Brand alludes to of producing most of cities' food in urban Xanadu farms, this is more flawed thinking. It displays the arrogant tech-religion of someone removed from an organic relationship with the land. It assumes that all those farmers taking up space in the countryside could really be producing food for all of mankind in much less space if only they knew better. Farmers just haven't figured things out that well yet, nevermind all those farming practices that have sustained humanity and nature for millennia. (Beyond this obvious scorn for rural farmers, there are many scientific impossibilities and oversights in the fantasies of urban vertical farms, but I will discuss these in more detail in another blog).

In addition to the article's flaws in reasoning, I find it to be arrogantly anti-countryside. It derides rural values and culture, and lauds the supposed cosmopolitanism that results from city-dwelling, as if the ghettos that blanket much of Chicago were bastions of sophistication and progress. I seriously doubt that life in the Altgeld Gardens housing project is more enlightened, civil, and chic than life in a typical village of the rural Midwest, or that the warzone-magnitude murder rates of Medellin's slums are a sign of higher civilization when compared to western Colombia's coffee-farming villages. In its orgasmic promotion of cities as places to which people gravitate naturally after a rational consideration of the unsophisticated, backwards country life, the article also fails to take into account the violence that has driven the growth of many cities. In the US, most of our cities swelled with people fleeing oppressive serfdom and terrorist violence in the South, while in Colombia much of the migration to the cities consists in people fleeing a vicious civil war. Yes, these people certainly calculated that living in the cities would be an improvement on their prior situation, but this could hardly be considered a freely-made decision, and it was not in response to the boring provinciality of country life, but rather in order to flee intolerable violence and oppression.

So basically I think this article is a poorly-thought argument coming from someone who naively, arrogantly regards urban living as the desirable norm. The only good takeaway is the article's implicit point that, from slumdwellers' ingenuity, we all could learn ways to have a smaller ecological footprint, even if we don't ourselves wish to be slumdwellers.