Cities or villages?

Cities



Cities are not habitats. City folk can, indeed must, participate in a momentum against urban living because city ways are one of the roots of our predicament and it is city inhabitants who will suffer the most in the coming years. Millions of people obviously can’t move out to the countryside or the wilderness tomorrow morning. If you can’t bring the village to the mountain, then bring the mountain to the village. This might be part of a solution. Bring some wilderness to the city. Cities must be de-citified. It will take insurgent imagination and imaginative insurgencies. Cities can become partly abandoned, partly re-created into a collection of autonomous villages separated by vast tracts of gardens and re-emerging forests, the whole region healed by becoming a sort of vast permaculture zone. Paradise paved need not be permanent.

What seems insurmountable often isn’t in reality. There is an urbanizing trend spreading across the continents, it is proletarianizing our brothers and sisters, threatening our fellow creatures, it is polluting and exploitative and unsustainable.

Cities don’t end where the suburbs dissipate into farmland. Rural living presently is but the flip side of the same coin of capitalist civilization. Rural people also work and shop and pay rent or mortgages and live out atomized lives. The air is cleaner and at least one might spot a deer and watch the stars at night, but private property, work and cops also control the countryside. There too habitats are invaded, plundered, polluted. Country folk are also incarcerated, carcinogized, monitored and punished. Our destruction of urban life entails the destruction of rural life. The goal is a geography where villages and clans and groups of friends dominate the social landscape, not vast tracts of farmland that feed cities or country estates that the privileged and lucky retreat to. The goal is healthy habitats, the creation of healthy environments and the healing of sick ones that can sustain all the life forms that live within them.

a place for everyone, continued

Of course this assumes that no one wants to be a commodity, that wage labor is viewed for the slavery that it is. It assumes that we are all tired of being ruled. There is room for wandering lone wolves, nomadic families and hobo tribes. 

The coming long emergency, when the oil runs out and the food stores are empty, will leave most of us profoundly unprepared. Do you know how to grow or gather food? Do any of your neighbors? I don’t mean a weekend garden, but enough to sustain you and your extended family over a winter. When the capitalist market collapses, and the stores have all been looted, what will you eat? Do you have seeds, a fishing rod or a hunting weapon? Do you know how to use any of these? Is there a place unpolluted enough that you could go to for food? Are you part of a tribe, a community or a clan? Are you woven tightly enough into any social group that would be willing to help each other out in a time of crisis, or are you an atomized individual whose social group consists mostly of your immediate family, with a few friends you see occasionally at work or at play? The vast majority of Europeans and North Americans, and of urban dwellers everywhere, are just like you. They have no seeds, no survival skills and no fishing rod or hunting weapon, belong to no genuine community, haven’t a garden or access to an unpolluted place from which they can gather food or medicine. You aren’t alone, at least in your predicament. 

 One doesn't always have the option of joining in social upheaval, most often you have to take responsibility and help create it. This isn’t as difficult as you might think at first. It involves taking time away from work. It means saying hello to a stranger. It asks you to stay away from Disneyland. Where possible it involves exploring the wilderness and countryside closest to you. Revolt requires being optimistic in the face of the nearly insurmountable. It means viewing privacy not as something to preserve and protect, but to unburden oneself from. It demands that you spend more time with children, not only yours, but children in general. It requires you to imagine a world without wage-labor, politicians, commodities, banks, mortgages, factories, automobiles, nuclear energy, chemical fertilizers, polluted rivers, depleted ozone layers, global corporations, prisons, police, toxic waste, morality, aristocracies, taxes, money, sweatshops, governments, imperial armies and widespread coercion. Sadly there are no guarantees. Self delusion is everywhere. Good intentions don't prevent us from reproducing the Old World.