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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

I would like to suggest we cede more of our land to nature, and increasing the amount of uninterrupted wilderness.

But that's going to not be popular with a lot of people because it means deciding what area we get to live in or don't. Some towns are going to be removed for lack of sustainability.

For this to work, we would need to also improve our land use policies in the towns and cities we currently live in.

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I suggest you look into the American Prairie Reserve! It's a really interesting non-profit located in Montana, which is dedicated to creating one of the largest uninterrupted pristine North American grassland biomes in the country. They do this through the strategic purchase of private tracts of land that connect public space (national parks, forests, BLM land, etc.) and remove all fences and other migration impediments, while still allowing recreational use by people. They even own and manage their own herd of American bison!

[1] https://www.americanprairie.org/

1. Only something like 6% of the US is urban. The majority is pasture and forests, which arguably is almost entirely natural. The second largest use is crop land.

2. Deciding where people can live is extremely tyrannical. Many people own this land, what’s the plan, take their ancestral home? That didn’t work out well any time in history.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/december/a-primer-...

Every time I see comments like this I come to the same conclusion. My bet: you’re from a city, young, white collar, perhaps grew up in suburbs on a coast?

Nothing wrong with that, but there’s a disconnect between those living in urban environments vs the country.

2. Deciding where people can live is extremely tyrannical. Many people own this land, what’s the plan, take their ancestral home? That didn’t work out well any time in history.

We are already deciding where people can live. It's called zoning, and zoning laws restrict how we can build our homes, where we live, and what transportation options we can use.

My proposal seem tyrannical, yes, but I paired it with improving human welfare in the land we didn't cede to nature, and probably more freedom to build and live overall.

Crazy talk, what if we started tightening regulation so small communities stayed small, and were increasingly built and revitalized in ways that benefited both the community and the surrounding wildlife?

you would create a horrible housing market where at first very few living in rural areas could aford a home there. killing the middle class in those towns, which would in turn cause the high earners (doctors lawers business owners)to leave as there would be no one that could afford their services, that would then drop the market after they left but all that would be left are the poor now with no jobs.

essentially you would be creating a inverse-gentresizing where the middle class leaves then upperclass leaves creating a ghetto.

I’m not sure where the leap from “create regulation” to “run-away housing prices” happens. That’ll happen in a growing city, but the effect tends to be a little lower in rural communities, particularly if regulation is tightened around expansion and lowered around densification.

> We are already deciding where people can live. It's called zoning, and zoning laws restrict how we can build our homes, where we live, and what transportation options we can use.

Mostly in urban areas. You go to the rural places we're talking about, you might find the zoning is minimal to non-existent. Implementing zoning would absolutely be a new restriction on where people can live, what they can build on their property. People in those areas are often used to doing nearly whatever they like on their own property - short of things that'd be illegal wherever they did them. You're proposing to take that away?

> We are already deciding where people can live. It's called zoning

Zoning is done in higher density areas, because it has to be. It's one of the tradeoffs you make when you choose to live in a higher density area.

In rural areas, or even in smaller towns, you won't find much zoning. And people who choose to live in such areas are making different tradeoffs (for example, lack of easy access to many kinds of services that are easily available in higher density areas).

Trying to command people who want to live in either kind of area to live in the other kind does not work out well. It's much better to just make sure that people who choose to live in each kind of area bear their share of the costs, and get their share of the benefits.

> My proposal seem tyrannical, yes, but I paired it with improving human welfare in the land we didn't cede to nature, and probably more freedom to build and live overall.

Your proposal is upside down.

We turn the suburbs into sprawl and take over nature because of restrictive zoning. People want to build a ten story building near the city, can't because it's illegal, so then they build ten one story buildings and use up ten times more land/nature.

> 1. Only something like 6% of the US is urban. The majority is pasture and forests, which arguably is almost entirely natural. The second largest use is crop land.

You have got to be joking, right? Just open Google Maps, switch to satellite mode, turn off labels and look at the US midwest, particularly Illinois. Any zoom level. Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, pretty much everywhere. It's a patchwork of farms. Basically all flat parts of the US look like this, except for extremely arid areas.

  654M acres pasture/range (35%)
  538.6M acres forest (28%)
  391.5M acres crop (21%)
  168.6M acres special use (9%)
  69.4M acres urban (4%)
  68.9M acres miscellaneous (4%)

Here is a discussion: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/26/745731823/the-u-s-has-nearly-...

Here is an article with a pretty graphic: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

Combining pasture with range seems wrong, if "range" is open grazing land. That is wilderness, just with livestock on it keeping flammable undergrowth down.

> The majority is pasture and forests, which arguably is almost entirely natural. The second largest use is crop land.

"Natural" is a black hole for the purpose of debate. Pasture is natural if the number of livestock are controlled, otherwise look out. Monoculture forests (have you driven through the western mountains and seen the beetle damage) have issues. Crop land- a massive issue to consider, if you want to see the impact just surf the satellite views of the US on Google maps, huge swaths of land with not enough "natural" in between. It would take very little proportionally, but significant (impossible?) effort to build in true swaths of "natural" habitat throughout impacted areas.

> Deciding where people can live is extremely tyrannical.

Can I live in your house?

Over 40% of land in the US is public owned. The federal government owns almost half off all land in the western US.

You don’t even need to turf people off the land they own - just choose to manage more of the land we already own as wilderness versus as a resource to be leased to ranchers and loggers.

Ranchers and loggers make the land not ‘natural’?

It’s still massive open space with lots of wildlife.

Why let perfect be the enemy of good?

Moreover the lack of logging caused the last few years' massive, out of control wildfires.

Loggers prefer to clearcut or cut down larger trees, which doesn't help with wildfires. Logging can be useful as forest management but it has to be properly regulated to achieve that.

Have you seen ranching and logging land? In general it’s actually very well managed. I for one like lumber prices on the down low so a single digit percentages of managed forest land being clear cut per year in a sustainable growth cycle doesn’t concern me. And while I’m not one for beef myself, I love to watch cows graze and when cows are held at reasonable density the look and feel of the grazed land isn’t all that different from nearby “untouched” land (keep in mind animals are also grazing that “untouched” land!)

We used to have bison and what not on prairie land. I personally view it as the natural state for much of the US.

I am working on setting up my off-grid sustainable farm. Cattle are relatively easy to keep if you have some average for grazing.

Ranching is horrible for wildlife. The cows eat everything the deer, elk, and antelope eat, and the fences prevent natural migration. I hate hunting ranched land. It's straight up ruined.

deer and elk jump cattle fences with ease. cattle eat everything true but so did the bison but we killed them. and cows are a close cousin.

"2. Deciding where people can live is extremely tyrannical. Many people own this land, what’s the plan, take their ancestral home? That didn’t work out well any time in history."

I mean, most of the land ownership in the US was obtained by ethnically cleansing the native inhabitants from their ancestral lands just a couple centuries ago, so...

There are several initiatives in the hunting and fishing community doing this, aka buying land, managing the wilderness, and making it available to the public.

* The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, or TRCP, is a non-profit 501(c)(3) coalition of conservation organizations, grassroots partners and outdoor related businesses, the main goal of which is increased federal funding for conservation while preserving access for hunters and fishers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt_Conservatio...

* MeatEater’s Land Access Initiative (designed to raise money so we can find properties that will provide more access for regular folks to hunt and fish) https://www.themeateater.com/pages/land-access

(Disclosure: no affiliation)

If we opened up zoning for denser housing this might just happen on its own.

It would be incredible if we could give up endless sprawling suburbs for smaller high density areas right next to nature.

> amount of uninterrupted wilderness.

Towns are not the problem, highways are. Specifically interstates and other roads built to that standards.

Roads lead to towns. You might need to remove these towns before you could disconnect the roads.

Highways and interstates are problematic, yes, but they often take away lands in suburban areas as opposed to the wilderness.

You could just have dirt roads. The problem isn't the road per se it's the crazy fast cars on the road. If cars rode at 12mph like they do on dirt roads, at about the speed a deer can gallop, that's like 25x less kinetic energy and if you hit a deer it'll bump and keep going.

> If cars rode at 12mph like they do on dirt roads

Cars are often driven at 40mph and faster on dirt roads around here. Bigger dirt roads would see increased speeds.

Cars frequently drive 100 km/h on dirt roads. Particularly in places like rural South Dakota, where it's almost all dirt roads.

Here in Alberta I regularly do 80-100 km/h on dirt roads where conditions allow.

But random towns in the middle of nowhere are not connected by such highways.

Speaking as someone who ran over a deer a few months back on a smaller road that connects these community. All kinds of animals cross these roads regularly and usually without impediments, can't be said for an interstate.

There is now an effort to provide passage for animals across highways using overpasses/underpasses. Though not feasible everywhere, they are usually placed near known migration routes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_crossing

I think this is one of the main division in the US Red Tribe/Blue Tribe division.

To Blue Tribe nature is a beautiful park we need to preserve and keep untouched. Work is done in an office, producing documents.

To Red Tribe nature is a source of raw materials to produce food, metals, power, etc. Work is taming and harvesting the resources of nature.

Blue Tribe keeps adding wilderness restrictions, which keeps taking away ways for Red Tribe to make a living, increasing rural poverty, and feeding resentment.

I hope that makes sense.

I think this is badly oversimplified and is maybe showing your own bias a bit -- though I'm probably going to struggle to address it without showing mine in turn (and maybe it's just mine reading it in your comment).

Your "Blue wilderness restrictions", writ large, are exactly based on a recognition that

> nature is a source of raw materials to produce food, metals, power, etc.

I think the policy differences arise downstream from that. Questions like, how to handle competing resource needs; how to manage current or future scarcity; and ultimately some disagreement about whether these questions even need to be asked (i.e. is scarcity of X actually a problem?)

I see it very differently.

The "Blue wilderness restrictions" I think of are banning logging, banning mining, banning new farming, banning dams, etc.

The "competing resource needs" are balanced in favor of keeping rural areas pristine, so city people can go hiking there and marvel at the untouched nature.

Most people live in cities, so when legislators decide these things, the city people priorities win.

And yet, blue tribe is the one who lives surrounded by metal and concrete while red tribe enjoys wide open spaces. See, caricature goes both ways.

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