Posted: Jun 16, 2018 2:23 pm
We can't all live as some Chinese communities do or be fed 'artificial' foods.
why ???
The wild planet is gone except for a few enclaves, if we want to preserve those enclaves we have to and are getting over this wild foods are better nonsense.....Meditor has a very limited understanding ...."the last forests" ....what a joke.....the Boreal Forest occupies an immense portion of the planet. Sure, tropical forests are under pressure but again in some areas are sustained and sustainable and some even growing ( shade grown coffee for instance ). Of course weather makes old style farming difficult ...so what ....it will and is forcing change to a different manner of supplying food.
Don't really care about "other" comments...they are simply ill informed and whinging for some first world little villages and family farms that are long gone.....or morphed into sustainable communes/villages which technology allows now.
Sovereignty is a problem but AGW is going to continue for the forseeable future as will ice loss and humans will cope.
When sea level rise forces cities to relocate then arcology will come into its own.
An arcology is distinguished from a merely large building in that it is designed to lessen the impact of human habitation on any given ecosystem. It could be self-sustainable, employing all or most of its own available resources for a comfortable life: power; climate control; food production; air and water conservation and purification; sewage treatment; etc. An arcology is designed to make it possible to supply those items for a large population. An arcology would supply and maintain its own municipal or urban infrastructures in order to operate and connect with other urban environments apart from its own.
Arcology was proposed to reduce human impact on natural resources. Arcology designs might apply conventional building and civil engineering techniques in very large, but practical projects in order to achieve pedestrian economies of scale that have proven, post-automobile, to be difficult to achieve in other ways.
Frank Lloyd Wright proposed an early version[3] called Broadacre City although, in contrast to an arcology, Wright's idea is comparatively two-dimensional and depends on a road network. Wright's plan described transportation, agriculture, and commerce systems that would support an economy. Critics said that Wright's solution failed to account for population growth, and assumed a more rigid democracy than the U.S.A. actually has.
Buckminster Fuller proposed the Old Man River's City project, a domed city with a capacity of 125,000, as a solution to the housing problems in East St. Louis, Illinois.
Paolo Soleri proposed later solutions, and coined the term 'arcology'.[4] Soleri describes ways of compacting city structures in three dimensions to combat two-dimensional urban sprawl, to economize on transportation and other energy uses. Like Wright, Soleri proposed changes in transportation, agriculture, and commerce. Soleri explored reductions in resource consumption and duplication, land reclamation; he also proposed to eliminate most private transportation. He advocated for greater "frugality" and favored greater use of shared social resources, including public transit (and public libraries).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
Hong Kong is merely an early warning as are tiny condos in places like New York, Toronto, Tokyo and London City.
China is already moving from smog ridden cities to immensely cleaner air and have the legislative power to mandate it. They have reached peak coal earlier not because of AGW specifically but because they can't breathe otherwise.
A parallel is London in the 50s ...ugly smog ridden, a dead river and London now ...clean air, much cleaner river yet much larger and even that is not really a planned mega-city as arcologies could be.
Here's a good article on the urbanization tho the horizon is limited in terms of sea level ...the outlined risks and challenges are well outlined
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016 ... planet-pay
In the time frames anticipated by the OP humans have time to build a different planetary structure but we ARE in the 6th great extinction and wailing and gnashing of teeth won't save that but acceptance that we must engineer our food and agriculture instead of this resource wasting insistance on "natural". Ever looked at the genetic structure of "natural corn" ?? It's frankenmonster.
Moving to aquaculture, vertical farming and arcologies in actually planned cities preserves the remaining wild spaces and the planet has a lot left....just not a lot of "pretty ones" like the Haida Guay.
On the flip side of urbanization, off grid technologies lets people have a technical civilization in small remote communities that can be designed to be self sustaining and not mine the planet's resources.
The Haida Guay has some examples....mixing a long history of preserving resources with modern marketing ...selling herring roe to Japan for instance - collected in a manner that does not harm the herring at all.
Communication technologies and zero carbon transport can link buyers and sellers of delicacies around the planet - in some cases preserving species and habitats by providing the funding and the opportunity.
Entrepreneurs in Ontario are farming shrimp and barramundi in a sustainable manner in old pork farms to provide high value products to the large Toronto market next door which is urbanizing at an insane rate.
The technology and the opportunity is there to cope with sea level rise and reach much higher populations in a sustainable manner ...bewailing the past doesn't help.
Compare the horrid state of medicine and medical knowledge in 1850 compared to now.
Sustainable planet tech is still in the 1850s compared what it could and will be. Things like CRISPR, gene management in species right down to the individuals, designer algae for food and fuel and even plastics and maybe, if the tech pans out a closed cycle for carbon based fuels.
Our imaginations are not capable of absorbing the technological progress that is in full flight.
Our will to implement the tech over fear ( genetics ) and NIMBYism ( city design) is the greatest impediment ( oh that windmill ruins the view, or is unhealthy etc etc ).
Human nature is the biggest barrier to a sustainable planet....sea level rise may just force the issue.
It's unfortunate that it requires a crisis.
Look at Japan and Germany building immensely better cities after being nearly destroyed.
The most promising factor in all of this is low cost wind and solar power that is not necessarily tied to a national grid so future looking companies like Ikea can build their own power and storage system and take their factory and factory town off the grid and to a sustainable local power supply right now.
Live, work and provide in demand, value added products from sustainable silvaculture.....that company really has a long horizon.
https://www.ikea.com/ms/en_CA/this-is-i ... index.html