There is not single isolated solution to climate change. A wooden house can be a solution if you have abundant wood nearby, which is not the case everywhere. The problem is the industrialization of everything and the urban consumerist way of life.
Ikea furniture is made of wood yet they're terrible for the environment because the wood comes from far away, is usually assembled in China, filled of fire-repellent chemicals (among others) and is not very strong because it's low-quality wood (made from throw-away pieces hacked together with glue). So your piece of furniture brings a lot of pollution and is not gonna last, compared to hand-crafted furniture (out of real wood).
The same goes for housing. People have been building houses out of straw and mud for thousands of years. Where you have wood, you'll build a solid base structure out of it and make big houses. When you don't, you'll just make a smaller one (< 15m²). Made a few myself, and these houses are way better than concrete houses: < 1000€ to build, fresh in summer, warm in winter..
But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be. We should stop listening to these "Green capitalism" and other profiting vampires, and build our actual autonomy before this industrial civilization collapses.
> But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be.
Wait, how so? Dense urban living is the sustainable alternative, if anything.
I always thought that but although half the worlds population lives in cities they are responsible for 70% of the worlds emissions. I guess people in cities are richer so consume more.
People in rural areas consume more when all else is equal though. Subsistence farmers do much better, but are you willing to give up your computers, tv, lights, central heat/air, plumbing, fast travel? If the answer to any of that is no you will use less resources living your lifestyle in a dense city than in a rural area.
We still need farmers in rural areas who will of course use more than their share of resources, but the number of farmers we need is small and so insignificant. It is the semi-rural suburbs that have enough people to make a difference.
We also have to take into account how our society destroyed local communities and economies. People on the countryside now depend a lot more on the global economy/industry than they did a few decades back, because local production was dis-incentivized by surrounding economical structures.
Take for example food. When you're on the countryside, it's not complicated to produce more than 90% of what you eat locally (up to 100% for people willing to give up on some spices, oil and other products not grown locally). What makes it complicated is that local farms were coalesced into big industries based on monoculture (which itself destroys the environment) so the food produced on the countryside doesn't feed people locally but serves as a source for big corporations to make derived products (usually less nutritive and bad for health) which rural and urban people alike will go buy in the supermarket (because there is usually no more alternative).
So i agree the current numbers don't reflect that so much, because of the self-perpetuating circle of heteronomy imposed by capitalism. But living on the countryside relying on local production is way more eco-friendly than any industrial civilization could ever be.
> the population is too high for subsistance farming now.
Is it, though? More than half of cultures are used for animal exploitation (which most of the world could do without). It appears we currently have around 2 football fields of cultivable land per person living on earth (though this may change soon with the climate).
We also have to take into account that industrial farming and monocultures kill the humus and dry off the land in the long run (over decades) making it more and more sterile (requiring an ever greater dose of fertilizers to grow anything and making the crops more sensitive to heatwaves).
Many serious agronomists (those not employed by the industry) insist not only that another agriculture is possible, but that it's the only way to prevent food shortages in the coming years (which will happen if we insist on chemical-powered monocultures).
Also, a one-garden-per-person model is not the only way to grow locally. We can of course share the land and the work. It just makes things a lot easier when the population isn't so dense that you can't grow your own food locally anymore (which is only the case with big cities).
> Dense urban living is the sustainable alternative, if anything.
How so? Concentrated populations means you have to produce (energy, food etc.) far away from where it's consumed. So you need to extract and produce on a big scale so that model becomes sustainable (if it ever is, which i doubt).
When the concentration is smaller, you can live in harmony with your local environment: produce your food, your energy, your clothes and houses with what's around you, which will always be better for the environment than shipping "eco-friendly" materials across three continents before reaching your supermarket aisle.
Production should be as close as possible to consumption. Concentrating populations means you can't locally produce electricity (because you need so much of it, it's dangerous to produce so you put it away from urban centers) or food (because you need so much of it, and the surrounding land is used for "urban development" and other sweet words for gentrification and privatization of space).
So i used to think some smarter industry regulations and government policy could fix the environment. Then i realized our entire civilization is based on fucking things up and exploiting other people, and those holding the reigns will not stop their bloody mess until they're made the planet uninhabitable. It speaks for itself that billionaires invest their fortunes in traveling to Mars.
We already produce enough food and have enough housing for everyone on this planet. On a global scale, a third of the food produced is thrown away. This reaches almost 50% in industrialized societies like Europe/US. Yet many people struggle to fill their fridge. Here in France (official stats by INSEE) 3 million houses are EMPTY (not secondary houses, UNUSED houses) yet 150 000 people sleep on the streets.
The same goes with the environmental crisis. It's not a crisis because we don't know what to do. It's a crisis because we know what to do to save the planet and it goes directly against our way of life as consumers, and against the interests of our ruling classes and industrial elites.
Transport of energy and food is a very small part of the global impact of getting them to customers, and dense living makes a huge impact on transportation impact. To convince people that they'd be better in straw houses, you'd need at least argumented numbers...
From all I've seen and read, the ecological impact of suburb and country living is a lot more than urban living.
That forgets another variable - efficency of production. The entire reason small anything cannot compete is economies of scale vs input of some sort fundamentally.
Thinking localism or pastoral will solve exploitation is not only naive but historically illiterate. Bronze age slavery was dubiously an improvement over genocide.
Humanity never really was in harmony with nature - the reason for nomadism was because they depleted the food resources locally. Hell nature is never in harmony with nature! Every effect you lament has happened before including mass extinctions due to life induced atmospheric changes (anaerobic extinction).
"because the wood comes from far away, is usually assembled in China"
I saw a documentary on Ikea and the furniture supplier was swedish(?) and made with Swedish wood. All the random tat came from china though.
Ultimately though I suspect you're comparing apples and oranges. I would expect a piece of Ikea furniture to be greener than a built to last, solid wood item. But then I wouldn't expect the Ikea furniture to last as long. At what point the made to last furniture become greener, and if that point is reasonable is the question.
Ikea furniture is made of wood yet they're terrible for the environment because the wood comes from far away, is usually assembled in China, filled of fire-repellent chemicals (among others) and is not very strong because it's low-quality wood (made from throw-away pieces hacked together with glue). So your piece of furniture brings a lot of pollution and is not gonna last, compared to hand-crafted furniture (out of real wood).
The same goes for housing. People have been building houses out of straw and mud for thousands of years. Where you have wood, you'll build a solid base structure out of it and make big houses. When you don't, you'll just make a smaller one (< 15m²). Made a few myself, and these houses are way better than concrete houses: < 1000€ to build, fresh in summer, warm in winter..
But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be. We should stop listening to these "Green capitalism" and other profiting vampires, and build our actual autonomy before this industrial civilization collapses.