Comment by an9n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by an9n | Hacker News Reader

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This is one of the reasons I am fiercely anti-immigration to the UK: there simply is not enough space left to accomodate more people here without a. smashing the remain biodiversity to pieces b. drastic impacts on the current human population's quality of life, as we are herded into pod cities to preserve the sad excuse for nature that's left or c. outright genocide, which sadly doesn't look that far away to me these days. Anyone that's pro-immigation needs to tell us which it will be. Personally I'm already planning to leave this country for good due to the overcrowding. I - like I suspect the majority of people in the country - never voted for mass migration, and indeed, there's clearly a globalist agenda that seeks to prevent the electorate being given a vote on this at all costs (see how completely insane they went over Brexit...). It's simply not a civilised way to live and not something I have any intention whatsoever of inflicting on my offspring.

Angry man against immigration: threatens to emigrate.

You would do better directing you ire against the British upper classes, who just removed the tax on internal flights, and block any attempt to provide alternatives to driving -- to give two examples that come to mind.

> Angry man against immigration: threatens to emigrate.

Bit of a weak and snarky straw man, friend. I'm absolutely not against immigration - what I am against is immigration to the UK, and any other already overcrowded place for that matter, when it necessarily results in destruction of the environment else destruction of quality of life for the population. Pod life will be miserable (intentionally miserable?) when it comes.

I agree with you on the ruling classes - who are ethnically distinct from and apparently contemptuous of the indigenous population, dating back to Norman times.

> what I am against is immigration to the UK, and any other already overcrowded place for that matter

Ah, so you'd like emigrate...off the Earth? /s

That seems an ideal solution long term.

Short term I think we have to find a way to allow more sustainable small multi-polar village life happen so we don’t all crowd into the same dozen or so mega-cities on the planet

Those mega cities are a lot better for the environment than villages or suburbs.

I guess people made similar wisecracks about people moving to the US (for similar reasons of liberty, QOL etc.) back in the day.

Yet you emigrated (at some point) to the Netherlands, which is even more crowded than the UK.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977602

> Yet you emigrated (at some point) to the Netherlands,

unless born there

> which is even more crowded than the UK

at least for now (0.37% growth vs. 0.48).

Temporarily, for work, somewhat forced due to wanting to make enough money to be able to afford to buy a house in the (overpriced due to overpopulation) UK housing market, and I lived in a (relative) pod, used public transport etc. etc. But well down Sherlock for your bloodhound-like skills.

It'sprobably better that people emigrate to the UK with its relevatively impoverished forest cover and relieve pressure on countries with better preserved ecology.

Or are you against people moving from the countryside to London too?

Nothing about that comment was "angry". Building more railways and slowing immigration are not mutually exclusive.

According to the ONS, the total fertility rate in the UK has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 since before 1980. Immigration is what has been sustaining (and growing) the population.

I think the current impact on the environment demonstrates that we need to (slowly) reduce our population - UK included.

However, according to the statistics, we can maintain a certain level of immigration while also reducing our population - and in fact need to do so to avoid an age pyramid that is so far inverted such that it causes great economic problems.

So while I agree with you that immigration ought to be restricted such that we don't continue population growth, we don't actually need to reduce it by much to make that the case.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

We are not even close to running out of space. In my eyes, the bigger problem is all those pretty fields with the livestock walking about in them. They should all be covered in forest.

I highly doubt immigration is affecting our population that much. Plus, as recent news has shown, UK is nothing without our migrant workers.

> the bigger problem is all those pretty fields with the livestock walking about in them. They should all be covered in forest.

If the UK replaces all its farmland with forest then they have to import all their food, right? That's not great for the environment, or the UK. A balanced approach seems reasonable.

You talk about smashing biodiversity. But farmland is often degraded already. A residential development can retain hedgerows, and include plots of land managed for wildlife. It absolutely can and should improve biodiversity. Also, the idea that Britain has been concreted over is a myth. Urban land barely gets into double digits in most of Britain. We have lots of golf courses though.

Where do you plan to immigrate to that you won't perpetuate the exact same problem you see as your main reason for leaving?

Really? The overcrowded countries are the exception, not the norm. It's proven that people need space and nature.

A lot of the world is low density, but high population. Subsistence farmers on small plots of land (often degraded with little nature). A dwelling every few hundred yards. It looks natural but probably isn't.

Virtually anywhere else the world that isn’t a major metro center.

To me the issue is really consumer culture. If you have a densely populated area where households own multiple large cars, pave over gardens to park them, drive them on ancient narrow lanes etc, that seems to me a big cause of nature destruction. And extending houses to have space for all sorts of possessions that are of doubtful value, or could be shared with others. There surely are far more densely populated areas than SE England in poorer countries that just don't have financial means to destroy nature to the same extent. There's a council estate a couple miles from where I live that has some reputation of being "troubled", "unsafe" etc, but to walk around it is quite pleasant, it has far less traffic, far more trees and bushes in gardens, due to being poor. Frankly a lot more birds singing there. To me the answer is if we all try to live rather more simply in terms of consumption.

You've stated your preexisting conclusions with great drama, but you have not related them back to the topic at hand convincingly.

Indeed.

Insofar as the presence of humanity is the enemy of biodiversity, the problem is suburban sprawl and excessive rural development, and the answer is urban density. Immigration is only a facet of that larger paradigm.

> the answer is urban density

i.e. live in the pod?

hah. I mean, I would have loved to try pod-living in my late teens or early twenties, sounds better than roommates.

They say that if everyone lived like a New Yorker, you could fit the world population in Texas. I imagine that if everyone in the UK lived like a Londoner, you could fit the non-London population in a London 2?

But before you come back and say "yeah well not everyone wants to be an urban hipster" and this turns into an "urban elite" conversation, have you ever thought about the flip side of that, a sense of "rural elite"? Land is limited. Space is limited. There's something odd about people with all the property in the world saying "this is all mine, keep everyone else out, there's not enough to go around, mine." And they don't have as much space as the average citizen, they have THE MOST SPACE.

Like, if this isn't a race or nationalism thing, would [parent] be cool with a mass exodus of Londoners who suddenly developed a taste for, I dunno, fox hunting or whatever? If not, why?

At any rate: living in the country and worrying about immigrants is ridiculous. They come to the cities to look for work, everyone knows that. Regarding biodiversity, I wouldn't support any kind of program that forced people to move to pods in the city, but we should certainly work on making cities more appealing so that people will make more sustainable choices.

>we should certainly work on making cities more appealing so that people will make more sustainable choices.

I think there's definitely a percentage of humans who are just hard-wired not to live in cities. I for one can't stand urban living, I'd be a depressed alcoholic within months of moving to a place like London I think. Don't get me wrong I'm not one of those "I hate cities and everyone who lives in them" sorts, I visit cities fairly often and appreciate their qualities but after a while I literally start tasting the air and feel gross for it. There's nothing that could make dense living in a concrete environment appealing to me long-term, and I think there's a bit of a presumptious attitude in some parts of this discussion* that we can just coerce, gaslight, or "nudge" people until they're mentally ground down enough to grudgingly live in a city. Personally I'd emmigrate long before we reached this point - I've had enough "nudges" for a lifetime over the last two years!

Remote working has been a real blessing for me, and hopefully things like Starlink will be even better for people who fall into the "knowledge workers who instinctively dislike urban life" category. I also recognise that this is an enormous privilege though, most of society isn't in a position to take advantage of these things and there's all sorts of issues caused by people moving to less well-off areas and driving up house prices and other services out of the reach of people who've lived their lives there. I'm not sure what the solution is really, but I definitely think there's shades of grey.

* not your post by any means, I think you make good points

Urban density can also mean multi-polar moderate urban density. With many smaller more dense villages scattered around a less heavily used countryside.

That also avoids us all taxing the same few nearby hiking trails like I see in some urban areas.

You're not convinced that bringing more people into a country whose ecosystem is already severly impacted by man will necessarily make things worse? ok then...

> a country whose ecosystem is already severly impacted by man

There is very little land on earth that doesn't meet this standard; even areas with very low population density.

I'm not convinced that concern about biological diversity is an honest justification for anti-immigration beliefs.

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