With the fires in LA it’s hard to feel optimistic about the future. I want to be reminded that all is not lost, we need to do a lot that likely won’t be done but there are still things to do.
So let’s say Climate Stalin became Supreme Leader of the World or just President of the United States tomorrow. Whats next? What steps do we take to stop climate change getting worse and mitigate the damage we’ve already done?
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.