UndercoverElephant wrote:MacIver wrote:UndercoverElephant wrote:But it relies on the cities importing resource from outside. As things stand, "outside" means the whole planet, via a fossil-fuel based global transport system.
Yes, but a decentralised civilisation would require even more energy.
How can eliminating the need for massive amount of long-range transport and of goods and people require more energy?
Because decentralisation
doesn't eliminate the need for massive amount of long-range transport and of goods and people, it
increases the need for it. Unless you're stating that people are just going to stop requiring/requesting/demanding complex electronics, metal, plastic, artificial fabrics and a whole host of other goods that cannot be made locally.
And with non-urbanised populations you see the fertility rate rise but with urbanised ones you see it fall. If one it truly concerned about population rise in my opinion one must wholeheartedly support the urbanisation of the planet.
I don't think that is going to work.
You don't think what's going to work? It's an indisputable fact that the more urbanised a society the lower its birthrate, whether we look at the Developed world or the Developing one.
Developed countries usually have a much lower fertility rate due to greater wealth, education, and urbanization. Mortality rates are low, birth control is understood and easily accessible, and costs are often deemed very high because of education, clothing, feeding, and social amenities. With wealth, contraception becomes affordable. However, in countries like Iran where contraception was subsidised before the economy accelerated, birth rate also rapidly declined. Further, longer periods of time spent getting higher education often mean women have children later in life. The result is the demographic-economic paradox. Female labor participation rate also has substantial negative impact on fertility. However, this effect is neutralized among Nordic or liberalist countries.[5]
In undeveloped countries on the other hand, families desire children for their labour and as caregivers for their parents in old age. Fertility rates are also higher due to the lack of access to contraceptives, generally lower levels of female education, and lower rates of female employment in industry.
[cont]
In terms of the effect of urbanization on fertility, it has long been established that urban fertility rates are pervasively lower than rural fertility rates, especially in poor countries (Kuznets 1974). The urban fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa is on average almost 30 percent lower than the rural fertility (Shapiro and Tambashe 2000; Dudley and Pillet 1998).
[cont]
OK, I watched half of this and couldn't take any more. I'm afraid it looks like a load of idealistic nonsense to me. Why? Because those slum areas he is talking about can only survive by importing vast amounts of goods and produce from the outside. They can't feed themselves, so they are dependent on the global industrial system to keep them going. This works only so long as the price of food remains under control, and that is not going to happen. Far from this being the way forwards, these are the places where the die-off is going to hit hardest, because there is nothing they can do to compensate for collapse of the bigger economic system in which they are embedded.
It may well be true that in the next ten years or so there will be a continued migration from rural to urban areas, but I believe we are going to see that process go into reverse at some point in the not so distant future.
Ah, I see. You're predicting a near apocalyptic event which will fundamentally change society. I don't necessarily see it as a certainty. But for the sake of argument lets say these "die-offs" are possible, or even likely. Then what happens? We go back to an rural agriculture society and again see a massive increase in fertility rates instead of the levelling off we're currently seeing? We just enter another cycle of urbanisation/decentralisation? People won't be any more accepting of short lives toiling away in the fields in the future than they are now. And I'm not confident that our species has the gumption to learn from history, we haven't shown any evidence of it so far.
If you had kept watching the video (or even better read
Whole Earth Discipline) you would of seen that there are solutions to the food problem, the main being GM crops. Add significantly increased yields with the same input of water and energy to the fact that worldwide urbanisation will see a tapering off of the population increase, and eventual population decline you'll see there are solutions that do not require billions of people dying off.
We are alive, so the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe.
by 
In your opinion.
