- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
- geography@mander.xyz
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- longreads@sh.itjust.works
- geography@mander.xyz
- hackernews@derp.foo
Lots to unpack in this somewhat ranty article, but also some food for thought.
Lots to unpack in this somewhat ranty article, but also some food for thought.
Wait, so on what scale of population do we peasants deserve a hospital and a college then? I’m really not sure I like this. Cities are fine for the folk who like them, but forcing all humans to live in them (even just in your mind) is inhumane. Some people want to live in cities, some people want to live in rural areas.
Right now, there are a series of insufferable folk who live in rural areas and do remote work. And small scale farming. And worse, ponies. Will I be re-urbanized in your utopia? How would you try to sell that to me? Am I supposed to like my new utopian city bullshit job? I have a remote one already and I don’t like it, I wish it didn’t exist, and that the poor PMs sending it to me from New York or Hong Kong could dedicate themselves to gardening or working in a (digital or physical) commons library and playing with their kids instead, thank you very much.
No need to become defensive 😅
Obviously everyone deserves these things, but you can’t expect them to exist in a 1500 inhabitant village. These kind of services have a natural catchment area and have always been located in cities to be closest the the highest number of people utilizing them.
As for your remote work in a rural area… Sure that’s relatively nice now, and definitely better than commuting hours each day by car to some BS job, but try to take an honest assessment just how unsustainable and dependent on individualized car infrastructure such a luxury lifestyle is (sorry trolling a bit on that part 😜). If you were actually working in a field like agriculture… sure no way around it, but your BS remote job doesn’t have to be in a rural area.
It might make individual sense right now due to low energy prices and comparatively much cheaper housing, but in reality you are externalizing a lot of environmental costs, which you would not as a city inhabitant living in an energy efficient apartment complex with services in walking distance and nearby public transport.
Puh, others have said most already with less words and I’m getting too frustrated here. You don’t seem to be aware of how the rural landscape with all its functions feeds the city, and the many functions people have in this landscape, and the change the rural landscape is undergoing with internet being a thing and people not having to live at their place of work.
Nobody here wants that everybody lives in small scale farms, that is an intellectual debate between Mr. Monbiot and Mr.Smaje which I consider quite silly because urban/rural is a yes-and matter, not a ‘people should’ matter.
Hmm, I think this is rather a communication problem, because I think I am very much aware, having grown up on a farm, worked for nearly a decade in something akin to agricultural extension services (but not exactly that) and are currently living in a 1500 inhabitant village.
But I am also painfully aware of just how unsustainable this kind of livestyle is, and honestly think that if you do not have a very good reason to be in that exact place (which I am slowly working towards personally), then it is worth considering for oneself if you are rather part of the problem and not part of the solution.
And looking around, I see very little awareness of this with rural inhabitants, who for the vast majority do not actually have a very rural lifestyle (except in regards to much higher than average resource use) and are at most indirectly involved in primary production.
Maybe you are living in the wrong village - what would you classify as unsustainable? We might be talking about different things. I’ve just checked, and where I live has a somewhat similar size. The local town might have 2000 inhabitants, the villages around maybe average at around 200 people. There’s a train station. There used to be several saw mills (I would like to see them return). Everybody is somehow connected to small scale agriculture, people keep sheep, goats, grow several field crops, tend home gardens, and tend forest land. The largest agricultural operations I see around here are poultry farms and berry plantations, but they are far and few between in desolate places and not destructive or disturbing in their current extension.
What we see around here: when too many people are forced out of small scale farming by political or economic reasons, the landscape starts to overgrow and wildfires start getting larger. One factor here is that a lot of the land around here is multifunctional land: my indulgent equines clear a few hectares of land which are covered with a wood crop currently, sheep and goat keep brush and brumble under control and clear fields after harvest. I also harvest several kilos of mushrooms and herbs every year just walking around the farm. The alternative to this setup: send some guys with machines to clear the land twice a year or risk the whole lot of trees burning down with a wildfire. And to do this service in an otherwise severely underpopulated landscape I only need an internet connection to get some cash in with my halftime remote job.
Some of these rural traditions and the ways different species interact to tend the landscape sustainably and efficiently have gotten lost (and in some places never really existed), but a lot of knowledge is still intact or can be recovered, and mixed with appropriate modern tech you can create a sustainable lifestyle that works in places where you cannot grow big grain crops - learning how to do this sustainably is another factor of what I am doing here. And I see that also the locals are aware of the challenges around water and climate change, and a lot of new ideas are coming in from locals returning from abroad and foreigners moving in. Of course there’s idiots, like everywhere, but I don’t think it’s all lost. I don’t know about island life, might be very different from this?
Well, that sounds like one of the few places where most people really are still working in agriculture and/or landscape conservation, which is great.
But that seems the rather the exception from the rule, at least as far as “developed” nations go. In the rural villages (in Europe) I had deeper insight to, maybe 10% of the population is still active in agriculture, and maybe another 20% indirectly in support services or landscape conservation. Some higher percentage do some small scale backyard farming, but really nothing on the level that would have much impact on the overall landscape.
The majority are rather working in jobs in the nearby towns (or are retired) and going there everyday by car. And driving long distances for the smallest of things is considered normal and “necessary”.
Basically everything is highly dependant on fossil fuels, from transport to heating etc. And the houses are large and need loads of heating / AC due to bad insulation. I have seen an increase in solar-systems though, because of higher homeownership rates, but that’s really insufficient compared to how much energy is wasted otherwise.
In the specific case where I currently live there is also loads of tourism, which adds to all that.
Uh… no. That is definitely wrong. There are absolutely rural hospitals…? I can think of several towns with fewer than 5,000 people and have a hospital. There’s one some 10 miles from my house. There’s also an agricultural college about 3 miles up the road from me.
The hospital might have been placed there by your government for political reasons and is most likely highly subsidized. Or are you maybe talking about a much smaller health center that refers most cases to an actual hospital in the nearest city?
An agricultural college can’t be placed in a city for obvious reasons, but it very likely also has a catchment area of tens/hundreds of thousands of people, i.e. city sized, but is just placed somewhere where you can have study fields and so on.
The hospital is over a hundred years old. It’s a real hospital. It’s not a big hospital, but it’s where I went when a nail went through my hand and they had all the necessary scanners and a surgeon and stuff. I’m not sure why you’d just speculate otherwise? You consistently downplay the depth of rural communities and I find it frustrating.
Well, I don’t know the exact situation there, but generally speaking it is not viable to have a typical hospital in a community of just 5000 people. It just doesn’t work out economically (even under ideal assumptions), which means other people must pay for it without benefitting from it, which is not exactly fair.
It’s not exactly fair in the same way that it’s not exactly fair that we have to grow food for you guys in cities. We do things for each other because we’re a society and being a society is cool.
I disagree, there is nothing wrong with asking rural inhabitants to come to a nearby city to get treatment in a hospital, if that means that the service of this hospital can benefit people equally instead of it being monopolized by a small number of rural inhabitants.
And no one is forcing anyone to grow food, rural inhabitants are not enslaved by city dwellers.
But a society needs a certain amount of food and other resources for a given number of people, there is just no way around that if you don’t want people to starve.
So what is your proposal to this? We can’t continue as is, and moving all the city inhabitants to rural areas is clearly also not feasible.
Would they not have a hospital/emergency care facility that is appropriately sized to cater to the needs of that particular community? I don’t really see how it would be a significant a drain on resources for a rural community to have that, unless I’m not accounting for something. And if that smaller hospital is adequate for the community, wouldn’t that reduce the burden on the larger city hospital?
I could see them still being required to go to a larger city hospital for more unique problems that require specialists, but for more standard care, on the surface it seems like a local hospital would be a good thing to have, especially since there might be doctors that would prefer to live in a rural area anyway, which would cut down the energy needed for their own commute if they instead had to work in a city hospital.
Maybe I am a bit more specific with the definition of “hospital”.
Hospitals typically means 24/7 full care with a significant number of in house patients.
A larger health center might offer 24/7 emergency care and some ambulance services, but is typically not equipped and staffed to deal with anything other that short term ambulant care.
Ah, I think definitions may be at the heart of the disagreements I’ve seen here. From what I’ve read just now, a health center in Europe and other places with universal healthcare is, as you say, a place with emergency care, but with only a small amount of beds available.
In the U.S., a health center is seemingly exclusively used to refer to a facility that cares for people without medical insurance or low-incomes, and does not relate to the size or capability of the facility.
So I think some of the other users here (if they’re US based) may be getting the idea that when you say there shouldn’t really be hospitals in rural areas, you’re advocating for having no in-patient medical facilities in rural areas of any type, and to require anyone with any sort life-threatening or serious immediate medical problem to travel to a city to resolve it, since for us, ‘hospital’ is pretty much a catch-all term for anywhere that can perform serious medical procedures, where as non-serious issues (colds/flus, diagnoses, getting prescriptions) are handled by Clinics.
EDIT: We do have Urgent Care Centers though, which could be an equivalent to Health Centers? I’m not entirely sure, I haven’t really used the medical system that much thankfully.
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