Another Hometree destroyed - Dale Farm eviction

[auroraglacialis]

Which is why I think what is NEEDED is to break down society into smaller bits. Allt he things that make humans comfortable get lost on a larger scale. This is completely logical because we as a species have come from a long history of smaller group sizes. That is the environment we do best in. If it is possible to keep the characteristics in larger groups, then that is fine, but what we see is that they break down very much to the detriment of the "inner" quality of life of the individuals. They may have more material wealth, but they loose immaterial wealth. The result is that while people in cities are more efficient, more productive, work more hours and accumulate more money and goods, they also are much more depressed, unhealthy, stressed, and suffering from physchological problems. There is a nonlinear connection between population density and crime (crime per capita goes up), drug abuse and sexual assault. People do not regard others as people anymore because there are too many. Instead they are treated like "others" that one can do stuff to that is not reflected back upon oneself.

The inevitability of this happening, you speak of, Clarke is only then an inevitability if people see efficiency at making wealth (which usually is just an euphemism of extracting wealth from others that are less efficient or able) as their prime objective. I think that paradigm is not holding up because people actually start to think again about what they really want in life and no second car replaces a good friend, no elaborate safety system with CCTV and panic room or even a guarded community replaces living in a community that is open and free but still not prone to crime.
So again it is a matter of what is primary and what is the priority - cities, economic growth, rapid development, material wealth, gadgets, new cellphones, 50 pairs of shoes and a second car - or a healthy natural world with wild places, people that know and trust each other, low or nonexistent rates of crime, rape and "screwing people over", houses that do not need to be locked. In many aspects these are incompatible. Some things go along well if the society is striving actively to do so but most just are not. The first impulse of people seems to be to want the former - but only because they think they can somehow manage to keep or regain all that is lost in the process later (by improvements, restoration, rebuilding) - only once they become aware that this is not possible they realize that they actually have to make a choice (or that they actually already made a bad choice). So I think it is of vital importance to humans and the natural world for people to realize that this is a choice. It is either or and one cannot simply have both.

Smaller communities does not by default mean living in straw huts. It could conceivably also work in some cities that are not too dense for actually forming neighborhoods. Though certainly I think cities with millions of people and neighborhoods with thousands of people will keep showing the characteristics that we see now in cities...

Clarke - I bet you will argue again that one solution to that predicament is your transhumanist dream that we somehow will be able to engineer humans or whatever that will be able to deal with high population densities just fine. I will not reply to that as I cannot even begin to describe the mountain of problems (ethical, practical and philosophical) with that.