Cities are for the best

I'm the same, almost. I can deal with living in a city but I'm far less shaky and less prone to panic attacks in more rural areas, which is strange considering I've lived in a city for most of my life. A lot of research has been done on how the environment effects us (some was published in a respected scientific journal, I forget which one). Turns out that nearly all 'modern' psychological problems - namely depression and anxiety disorders - are virtually non-existent outside of urban areas, even when the parents had a genetic predisposition. There was also research on animals that showed a definite correlation between environment and their intelligence - those which lived in "box" shaped environments (cages, rooms) were judged to have lower intelligence than those who lived in more chaotic environments.

 

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this is an error. check up on some abortion/contraceptive use statistics. you might like to think that it is only because we are too dense to resist the pressure of family planning groups, but the reality is that many people choose not to have children for a variety of valid reasons (low income, age, relationship problems, socio-econimic situation, the love of a life without big responsibilities).

wether or not these reasons seem moral to you is completely beside the point. we have contracepion and abortion because there is a high demand for these services. the needs of an existing person come before the needs of a potential person (for reasons that are blatantly obvious), why can't you accept this?

 

Even if people are less environmentally destructive per capita than people living in rural areas, cities in and of themselves are environmentally unsustainable.

 

Mr. Ince didn't bother to mention or factor in, that in order to build a high rise city, its requires almost total envirnoimental destruction to the place its built.

 

Modern cities are also enormous energy-hogs as it takes lots of transportation (energy!) and lots of intensive agriculture (much of modern agriculture necessary to feed the huge volume of people in modern cities is also very environmentally destructive) to feed so many people.

 

I believe your only correct on the issue partly but really wrong over all. Most major cities ship out thier waste products to other suburban and rural locations like trash and sewer. They air quality is far worse, the run off is poluted by heavy concentractions of oils, and other polutants. The only less impact they would have is the space required for the human to dwell.


A city such as New York for instance requires over 150 Semi trucks per day to transport goods just for the survival of its people. This does not count bs items but food, medical supplies and items required for employment. These goods have to be raised, made, ect on lands outside the city and transported by means of heavy polutant trucks and tractors and ect to get them to the people within the city.

So if you lived on some land and did not produce for the others but rather produced for self use and local trade, allowed the city dwellers to starve out then the issue would be mute.

I would think that this research would take into account the air quality, they water quality surrounding the city, the amount of lands required to support the city (food, disposal, energy, ect).

The cities air qualities are so bad and the amount of trucks needed to support the people is so great that they make truck drivers in the dead of winter and the extreme heat of summer suffer but not allowing them to be able to heat or cool thier trucks with laws and fines against it.

 

Being too dense, is hardly a practical nor moral reason for "family planning." What does that really have much to do with whether another child can be loved and welcomed into a family?

And yet fashionable population phobias are often an underhanded sinister motive of abortionist butchers, euthanasia freaks, and "family planning" workers seeking to "manufacture" an "unmet need" for contraceptives, even where little if any demand existed before.

And my focus generally is more on those who choose to have children anyway, and respecting their freedom and rights and duty to have their children, than on convincing selfish people who aren't going to be convinced, to have more children.

Population pessimist author Paul Ehrlich, opined in his now largely discredited sensationalistic book, The Population Bomb, that "family planning" was a huge failure, because by allowing individuals "choice," it denies society any choice in the size of the population. One family will choose to have 3 children, and another family 7 children. But both add to the population size. Well I am against "family planning" also, but from the other side of the debate. If the shoddy contraceptives even sometimes don't work ("failure" rates), and people supposedly will choose, as Paul Ehrlich claims, to have children of a number to keep the population growing, isn't that all the more reason to advocate significant, although also gradual, human population expansion? Out of respect for the sacredness and dignity of every human life, the supposed "need" people have for sex especially once they have found their lifelong (marriage) mate, and for building society and civilization in accordance with God's commandments. And having more babies promotes the greater good of the many, so it is a very moral thing for societies to encourage.

Weren't all "existing" persons "potential" persons in the past? So is there really all that much difference?

I read something a while back, of the platform for the Constitution Party. Their immigration position was something about that immigrants should have sponsors. Well I say they should either have their own money, seek productive employment, or have a sponsor, and of course, be of high moral character. Well most any baby is brought into the world by "sponsoring" parents. Babies inherit citizenship of their nation, and this is morally and logically an "unlimited" right that passes on from generation to generation. It has to be that way, and it's quite practical, or we would have huge numbers of people with no home country to live in. Procreation is a family responsibility, not a government responsibility, other than for government to protect the basic building blocks of society--the family. So the government can't possibly have any jurisdiction in restricting how many children married people may have, as such profound things, are up to God.

 

No, cities don't "destroy" the environment, they merely alter the environment, to favor certain types of creatures (people) over other sorts of lesser value creatures (useless "spotted owls" and "snail darters").

You can't "destroy" environment, for that means that it doesn't exist anymore. Sure it exists, but it's altered to be more suitable for some things than other things.

Enormous energy hogs? Well what do you think I have been saying for, that people in developing countries, need abundant and cheap energy? It takes energy to run prosperous cities, a key reason why the "global warming" deceivers concocted their "global warming" swindol hoax. Because they oppose freedom and prosperity for the masses, and want to enslave the people, especially the lying globalists at the top.

Perhaps, some would say, that putting so many people in cities, requires cars and buses and trucks, and of course, heated homes and air conditioning. While there is a little room for conservation of energy, it soon is eaten up by natural population growth, and so development and producing more, and improving technology to serve more people better and cheaper, is the way to go.

 

I think you are talking of stupid excessive "laws," against truck drivers idling their trucks all night while they need to sleep. The problem is, that all that comfort heating and air conditioning, often runs off the truck's engine, which is very inefficient to run, just for that, but far more efficient to run, for that + cruising down the highway at the same time. The supposed solution, is to provide all those comforts for truck drivers, via some external connection to their window, while parked at a truck stop. But I think that idling trucks must be allowed, where such alternatives are not realistically available. With as much as it costs to rent a motel or hotel room, I doubt that idling a truck all night costs any more, and it's not like it is the truck driver's money, but a mere "business expense." We don't want for all the truck drivers to quit, right? The excessive taxation that a stupid liberal government and society imposes, creates perverse incentives for such "business expenses." Why try to conserve more fuel or resources, to have such "excess" profits be eaten up with more taxes? Less "profits" equals less tax, or too often it seems.

 

the last adbusters i read had some interesting things to teach me. they talked about modelling a sort of biointensive housing system after the slums found in 3 world countries. obviously slums are terrible places to live, but they also have a very small environmental footprint. there was a neat drawing of how all the available vertical and horizontal space could be used as housing units. salvagable materials like shipping containers could be used and it would be eltremely affordable. i think its a very promising solution to population and poverty issues. i will always have to have a farm, its just who i am and how i was raised, but many people would be more than happy with this kind of housing. if i were to live in the city, id much rather live in a modern slum than the suburbs, thats for sure.
ill try to find the drawing and article that was in the magzine.

 

This is taken out of context - urban areas can't exist without rural ones.

 

How can you be so sure? Many things currently done in supposedly rural areas, could be done in the big city, if ever necessary. Is there really any technical "requirement" that people live far away from the water treatment plants? Couldn't synthetic food be manufactured, in factory buildings right next to residential housing? Why is all that underutilized "open space" really all that essential? If or as growing cities grow larger and closer together, and merge into one another, does the rural space "suffer" or get "destroyed?" Not really, it is still there, it just isn't so "rural" anymore.

I favor people to spread out, as why be smushed together needlessly, but also to populate more densely and efficiently together, as may be required or as they may sometimes prefer. Whatever it takes to admit whatever additional people to the planet, as God may allow to be born.

I heard somewhere that they did some experiment on apes, in which they kept adding more and more to the same confined cage, to supposedly simulate the world population situation and how it might supposedly affect people. The apes took to grooming one another and sought to avoid conflict. Whoops! Not quite the result they were hoping for. Where's the population scare tactic propaganda value in that? So we rarely hear of that experiment, and always hear of the even more irrelevant experiment of the disfunctional mice or rats. Are people so stupid we can't even learn from apes? If people are getting more smushed together, because of the natural need we have to breed, then shouldn't we be adapting our residential environments at least, to hold more and more people, by either making cities and towns bigger and more numerous and closer together, or by stacking people and housing them closer together, or both, as needed?

 

But is such an intensive housing system, all that necessary? Perhaps in a few places, in which the elite rich hoard all the land, leaving only 1% of it left, for the working poor?

Yes, there are obviously ways, to rebuild housing, so that just as many people may be populated just as densely, but more comfortably and safely. Highrise buildings with spacious housing units, comes to mind.

And I do like the idea of reusing old concrete and bridges, for housing, if it ever can be done economically. I think there is a certain "artistic coolness" to a unique house that is functional, it's look being defined out of old materials that were reused to make it. But I imagine a lot of that stuff to reuse, is in poor condition, hard to transport, of the wrong shape, etc. And don't forget, it must resist the weather well, and of course, be waterproof and possible to insulate to keep in the warmth.

And I would think that there is more that could be done, to sort of "stamp out" cheap houses from factories. They could be nice, well-equiped and spacious, but some of the uniqueness may be lost, one's home looking identical to one's neighbor's. Or perhaps modular kit designs, may allow for some easy, limited variability?

What makes a slum a slum, isn't so much the crappy housing, but the poverty and people's bad attitudes and behavior problems. Otherwise, some of the poverty would likely lessen, and a huge part of the poverty problem, is how greedy unaccountable corporations seek to redefine the culture to serve the corporation, rather than working themselves to better serve the people.

An economy is supposed to serve everybody, not the elite rich few, and yet most all important decisions are made by rich elititists, who don't even live in the real world of the working poor. Maybe if somehow, more rich elitists would spend a year living as in The Prince and the Pauper, in switched roles, living amonst the poor, maybe it wouldn't be so hard to get decent living/family wages out of these greedy and stingy corporations?

 

Take all the people now stacked in high-rises and level them out to ground level and there will be even less wildlife habitat than currently and even more extinctions due to habitat loss.
Which is more sustainable? You still have the same number of people with needs for food, heat, energy, water, waste management, etc.

You could make human habitation more efficient by bringing agri, water, manufacturing closer to the people, reducing waste, etc. but when the population hits many billions more people, there will still be a loss of wildlife habitat. And more demands for water, other resources, waste and energy management will be more demanding, etc.

Which is then contradicted by ..

Suburbs eventually become urban centers cos of population growth. The older generation in the suburbs are seeing their neighborhoods become more and more densely populated. We "don't want to live on top of each other" but as the population grows more and more that is exactly what's gonna happen. I don't think you know what you're talking about, you are innumerate. And contradictory as I've proven by putting the above quotes together.
more population = more population density ... the evidence is all around us.

There are examples right here in Toronto of people fighting high-rise development, but really where are people to go. To the suburbs, sure, but even they will be just as crowded as Toronto as more ppl are introduced into the world. To other planets, now we're being complacent, that prospect is even more expensive, let's try to live sustainably on this one first.


All of you who prefer to live in less dense areas, well naturally, wouldn't most of us want more space. But it's sort of exasperating to say this cos supply and demand laws dictates that rising population increases real estate costs of low-density housing so most of us won't have the choice but can only afford to live in a shoebox.

 

many spread out ranches and such are very good for wildlife, simple because the animals have fewer houses to deal with.

 

As if food is the only thing required to sustain a city that comes from rural areas, and as if it is convenient/possible to even sustain a city in such a way. What about lumber? Are you going to synthetically produce that? Minerals? Even such basic things as gravel for pavement/cement/etc.

When I have more time and less contempt for you, I'll show you some real world examples of where cities are directly supported by hinterlands.

 

Actually we need both the urban and the rural for sustainability, at least currently with the way civilization is designed. Without the urban centers the rural would not be as sparsely populated as they are now but suburban sprawl would be even more expanded than it is now and even more so with pop. growth. We're likely to grow a minimum of 2 bil. ppl within this century.
We need the rural areas for reasons that don't need to be repeated, it's obvious.

 

But the point is, that the government isn't supposed to be communist/socialist, deciding for everybody every detail of their lives. God is omnipresent, government is not. Presumably, the best first option for expanding human populations, is to spread out, but instead, people depopulate the countryside to move to the big city. Why? One reason is poverty, and so there should be alternatives to use technology to bring jobs to where people live already, and to give them more options. But obviously, probably many or most people, don't move to the city because they have to, but because they like the excitement or convenience of city life, want meaningful jobs rather than a slow country lifestyle, etc. Some people might prefer to live near shopping malls and centers, or near parks or people in hobbies like them. So why debate whether people should live more dense in urban centers or not? Let them live where they choose to live, especially all the more important to allow for people to naturally adapt to their naturally rising population numbers. Ultimately, you can't set "boundaries" without adversely affecting human rights, as perhaps it increasingly takes the entire planet, just to hold all the people?

Do all these wildlife, pay taxes? Do the wildlife, vote? Do the wildlife, build cities and civilization? No? Then why would they even enter into the consideration? Do you really think I should cry for maybe a few displaced squirrels or birds, when I cut down a tree or two to make way for an addition onto my home, due to my growing family? Why? The squirrels don't even think of such things, and probably don't cry over anything at all. The population needs to hit many billions more people, because what of building civilization, the greater good of the many, and that most people aren't finished having their children? Energy management? That's why we need pro-growth, pro-people, pro-family, pronatalist policy. So we may be more kind to our many neighbors, and all may have their proper place and be welcomed. The developing countries need cheap and abundant energy, as presumably in an increasingly modern and populous world, not everybody can be or would want to be, lowly peasants and poor farmers. So we don't need enviro-wacko poverty-inducing, excessive energy "conservation" schemes, nor Enron-style (mis)management, but rather pro-people development. People need plenty of electricity, because the rich and the moderately-well-to-do, will always insist upon running their central air air conditioning, and it would be a pitiful outrage if capacity isn't planned for and isn't enough, so that rolling blackouts cause food spoilage in people's refrigerators. Without electricity, people are more prone to take to the streets in protest, and the results may not always be pretty.

Don't you think I know that? Of course I advocate that people live "on top of one another," if ever the population naturally becomes so enormous, that that ultimately becomes the only option. I find it rather strange, that so many supposed "environmentalists" so disrespect nature, that they condone the reckless experimentation with shoddy contraceptives, to prevent human populations from expanding naturally, especially among people who many actually want to continue having their "traditionally very large families." But I don't think it all that likely that it is going that way. For one thing, what of the "birth dearth" afflicting Europe and more and more of the world, no doubt induced by rampant contraceptive peddling, often partly mistakenly called "the demographic transition," as some sort of "magical" drop in human fertility that supposedly comes with increased wealth and/or modernization? But as I read on some website, there is nothing about having money in one's pockets that magically sterilizes the reproductive organs. And then there's the matter of time. I don't think humans have that much time left on the earth, before the Biblical endtimes, and even demographically, human populations couldn't naturally expand so much, within the forseeable future, roughly equal to your and my lifetimes.

I advocate increased population density, as may be needed to somehow accomodate the world's burgeoning billions, because Abraham and Lot's tribes deliberately spread out, as described in Genesis in the Bible. Why? Probably so that they could keep growing their numbers, all the more comfortably and safely. Did they not realize, that by so doing, their growing tribes would ultimately grow closer together again, in today's modern world of supposedly vanishing frontiers, with more people alive than ever? So what was the point then? Well if they were smart, it wasn't to "control" human population growth at all, but rather to "buy time" to find whatever means to adapt to the higher population densities ultimately to eventually come. Obviously, people aren't going to understand being corralled into some restricted space, when there is space all around them that they could spread into, and likewise today. There's even some conspiracy theory talk I have heard of years ago, that when the United Nations or globalists or whatever take over, they will put all the people into restricted zones, to supposedly "protect" huge zones for nature. Oh really? Why is it so hush-hush then? Because if the general public was to get wind of such nonsense, they would be a huge outcry for the U.S. to withdraw from, and withdraw funding, of the UN or whatever globalist conspiracy-powermongers. Racist, oppressive population "control" isn't a very easy sell, without making up pseudo-scientific nonsense logical-sounding gobblygook, to confuse the typical American TV/corporations-dominated morons.

Population shouldn't even be the issue here, as there could be many issues going on. Why does everybody have to live in the same place? Canada already has a ridiculously low population density, especially compared with the rest of the world. And then, people sometimes oppose change, or oppose apartment or rental housing, because it tends to draw undesirable transients, who too often don't care much for their responsibilities towards preserving a good community, family-friendly environment for people to live in. Then, highrises don't always match the "character" of the community, supposedly casting shadows or something on people's homes. I think highrises can be beautiful places to live, if they are well-designed, can attract good neighbors, and are governed right. Maybe more condo owners, and less "rentals" could help? Maybe more honest maintenance fee structures, rather than baiting people with low fees that can't possibly keep up with future expectable expenses to common roof and other maintenance expenses?

And like I may have said, I see no need to rush off too fast to spread people to more planets, because until the technology improves quite a lot, how could it possibly even be cost-effective? Technologically and practically, it's a lot easier and cheaper to cram several planet's worth of people onto this single planet, than to figure out how to transport so many billions of people to other worlds or make other worlds habitable. Why build spaceships out yonder, when we can build "spaceships" in our own backyards, that don't really have to blast off or go anywhere, far cheaper? Population arcologies then, seems to be the appropriate, more extreme term. Or for now, moderate continued growth in suburbs here and there, as we already know well already how to do.

Well then the obvious answer, is to build more housing. The people will build or buy their own homes, if allowed the freedom to do so. People need jobs anyway. There's no reason to expect the cost per square foot of housing to increase, but rather to decrease with the advancement of technology. Just don't expect your square footage to be miles away from thy neighbor's square footage, as obvious that isn't possible for everybody. Fortunately, not everybody wants that.

 

Sorry, but the only thing this thread proves is that arguing is stupid. I don't actually think anyone has walked away with a new perspective - if anything, all that has been gained is a clearer definition of our arguments. Now you can flame me all you like for saying that but all I'm doing is stating the truth.

Pronatalist, you are the one most people here disagree with, and the reason why is that you seem to have no idea of the value of nature, of other living organisms - all of your arguments are based on the assumption that the multiplication of human life is all that matters no matter what the cost. I and most other people here understand the thinking behind your philosophy, but truth be told, in the real world, it is neither compassionate nor realistic to ignore all other forms of life. In other words, you need to rethink your position because writing paragraphs and paragraphs of text trying to justify what you are convinced of is not going to convince anyone else - If you are trying so desperately to prove it to other people, it goes to show that you're not so sure of it yourself.

I'm sure we all agree that in a perfect world we should be aiming for an infinitely large population, but the world *isn't* perfect, it isn't just here for us, and building more and more houses in an attempt to shape it into something more hospitable will only upset the balance and end up wiping us out anyway. The only option we have in order to continue our way of life is to make *careful* decisions based on what we know - we can't just carry on ignoring the warning signs and assume that things will sort themselves out.