Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [22]
Urbanization, perhaps the most powerful global change process of the industrial age, is rapidly concentrating human populations across the world into the market-based economies of cities, decoupling most of humanity from agricultural livelihoods and direct interactions with rural lands.34 And while urbanization is nothing new, its current scale and rate are unprecedented.35
Urban economies of scale, particularly in human interactions and infrastructure, accrue as a result of population density and lead to improvements and additional advantages in nearly all aspects of human systems, including better health care, incomes, housing, access to markets, transportation, and waste treatment among many others.36 Urban populations also tend to experience much lower and declining birth rates.37
Yet the greatest global effects of urbanization may be realized outside of cities, which occupy less than one percent of Earth’s ice-free land. Rural-to-urban migration leads to the depopulation of rural landscapes, and massive urban demand for food and resources leads to the upscaling of agricultural systems.38 The process is complex, but such trends tend to concentrate production in Earth’s most productive agricultural lands, boosting agricultural yields in these areas through intensive use of inputs and technology by large-scale farming operations.39 Depending on whether governance systems are in place to take advantage of these transformative powers of urbanization, large-scale forest recoveries can and have taken place in response to the widespread abandonment of marginal agricultural lands.40
As a result, massive urbanization may ultimately prove yet another stage in the process of agricultural intensification. In this case, increasing human population densities in urban areas drive ever increasing productivity per unit area of land, while at the same time allowing less productive lands to recover. Multifunctional landscape management may then support both intensive food production and habitat recovery for native and other desirable species.41
4.
With urbanization shaping the Industrial Age, and as we move rapidly into the most artificial environments we have ever created, the decisions we must make are ever clearer. Indeed, even as urbanization drives advances in some forms of agricultural productivity, the trend is rapidly spelling an end to some of the most ancient and productive agricultural human systems the world has ever seen — the ancient rice paddies of Asia are being transformed into factory floors. As we did at the end of the Paleolithic, most of humanity is defecting from the older ways, which will soon become hobbies for the elite and nostalgic memories for the rest of humanity. Just as wild forests, wild game, and soon, wild fish disappear, so do the human systems associated with them.
While there is nothing particularly good about a planet hotter than our ancestors ever experienced — not to mention one free of wild forests or wild fish — it seems all too evident that human systems are prepared to adapt to and prosper in the hotter, less biodiverse planet that we are busily creating. The “planetary boundaries” hypothesis asserts that biophysical limits are the ultimate constraints on the human enterprise.42 Yet the evidence shows clearly that the human enterprise has continued to expand beyond natural limits for millennia. Indeed, the history of human civilization might be characterized as a history of transgressing natural limits and thriving. While the Holocene’s relatively stable conditions certainly helped support the rise and expansion of agricultural systems, we should not assume that agriculture can only thrive under those particular conditions. Indeed, agriculture