> Instead of living in a huge house and needing a lawnmower, move to an apartment (and vote for more compact housing zoning).
Or stay on your land, learn to grow food, eat healthy and profit from selling your excess to those poor depressed souls trapped in tiny boxes.
Because if my future is in an apartment I might as well get a better carbon footprint right now by killing myself.
But big lands with very few people living on them, is very hard to do at scale, especially when taking biodiversity loss into account.
edit: I agree that houses should not be "huge", because it's too much energy to heat. But a reasonable space is not much to ask.
Usually, in order to be any excess, you need to devote 40+ hours a week to growing food. Part-time small-scale gardening usually doesn't produce enough to cover caloric needs of even just a single person.
Sounds great. But statistically, almost never happens. All they do is plant monoculture grass that they don't maintain anyway, filling the world with pesticides and other chemicals that ruin the planet.
I was with you until this:
...to those poor depressed souls trapped in tiny boxes.
You seem to be trapped in your tiny suburban fears. How awful to be "trapped" by having several hundred restaurants to choose from. I'm so depressed by having a dozen museums, dozens of coffee shops, libraries, parks, and hundreds of entertainment options within a 15-minute walk of my house. So awful.
Much better to be "free" by living in a shack in the middle of a windswept prairie with no infrastructure, no culture, nowhere to go, no people to see, and crap internet service.
> How awful to be "trapped" by having several hundred restaurants to choose from.
I don't eat out - me and my family cook our own food. It's cheaper and you know what you're eating. We also enjoy eating at home as a family, and having conversation as a family without umpteen other families or singletons/couples either overhearing or participating in their own conversations at the same time.
> I'm so depressed by having a dozen museums, dozens of coffee shops, libraries, parks, and hundreds of entertainment options within a 15-minute walk of my house. So awful.
Blinkered vision and sarcasm. Also, very selfishly subjective. Not everyone is like you. Not everyone wants to visit museums (I despise museums), go to coffee shops (see above), I don't visit even my local library. Sometimes it's suggested we go to some $entertainment_option and sometimes I'd like that but mostly having to mix with other people brings me out in hives - not due to being anti-social, but due to liking my peace and quiet (I don't like crowds).
I'm in Scotland and prefer open spaces and spectacular mountain ranges to little artificial-landscape parks where the pod-dwellers walk to pretend they're in some kind of open and "green" space which is actually located in the middle of their dystopian metropolis.
See, this is the problem with all the people who are proposing living in the pod in some metropolis somewhere - they're talking about their personal preference for such and haven't even considered either geographical location (which country outside of the USA, which part of said country, and so on) nor what _other people_ like to do, eat, or live with, or any number of additional factors. Everyone who is advocating/proselytising for the metro pod-life, needs to think outside of their particular box. Or pod.
I love nature. I lived in the desert for years, and really enjoyed it. But I also realize that people can do both: Enjoy living in a city, and enjoy nature.
Disingenuous people try to paint a picture of apartment living as being "trapped" in a city. Which is simply a lie. People who live in cities can get in these things called "cars" (rentable by the hour, day, or week) and "trains" and go other places to enjoy nature.
The difference between city living and country living, is that the city dwellers don't build their homes on top of nature, killing nature, forcing nature into smaller and smaller boundaries. We do the opposite: We put the people into a defined space so that the natural world can flourish.
If you love nature, stop building houses on it.
My own house was built in 1885 and is a terraced cottage in an old coal mining town where mining stopped decades ago.
You, are actually advocating I forego this for a pod/apartment in some shitty city somewhere. Have you seen Glasgow or Edinburgh? They're literal shitholes.
Disingenuous people try to paint a picture that their pod living /isn't/ being trapped in a city. Which is simply a lie. These people are advocating for the WEF "you will own nothing, and you'll be happy" dystopia.
To which I say "No."
Edinburgh is one of those places where it's a "nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there" - i.e. it has some tourist spots - and is getting worse due to lack of infrastructure maintenance let alone building new infrastructure. Glasgow has been turned into a literal shithole. Both thanks to 15 years of a Nationalist Socialist administration hell-bent on nothing but breaking up the UK therefore cares nothing for the people it governs and is one of the most corrupt governments in Western civilisation.
I lived in an apartment for several years and only moved into a house within the past couple.
The single-bedroom apartment we were in had a handful of fast food places and maybe a couple dozen other restaurants within a 20 mile radius (i.e. far from being able to bike there -- not that we had anywhere to store bicycles, anyway).
We had 0 museums, maybe 2 coffee shops (half of which were Starbucks), one library (which we also have by the house), same number of parks, and only a few entertainment options. Most of which were either a movie theater or shopping, which doesn't really help fight the mass consumerism problem.
This was not in some dump area, either. In fact, that area was growing rapidly. Mostly by building more concrete bunker apartments. I can't even count the number of trees that were cut down to support this with 0 replanting (not even for decoration).
Yeah, really sounds like it's saving the planet.
So I get it: well-planned urban apartments and higher density areas can be more ecologically sustainable, but it's more nuanced than that. Apartments aren't just magically/categorically better. A lot of apartment developers aren't really considering environmental impact when building.
EDIT: oh and our internet is about double the speed of what it was in the apartment, even though the apartment complex was in an area with Google Fiber. It just wasn't available to us.
The bank is the best landlord I ever had.
I think that a lot of $$$$$$ IT workers forget about slumlords (or are slumlords themselves!)
No, you got it wrong: it's not fear, it's experience. I've lived literally steps away from some of the best restaurants, museums (do you know Le Louvre ? The British or the Tates ?), coffee shops, libraries, parks and entertainment (AKA ways to consume even more) options. They're no match for the forest I enjoy everyday. I pity my old friends that stayed there during the lockdowns too. Of course a lot of them are now actively searching for a house in the country. Not that I want to sell it, but because of them my little house has now doubled its value.
You prefer the urban life, I get it, and it's fine with me (actually I used to enjoy it too, until I didn't), I think everybody should be happy with his life.
> But statistically, almost never happens.
Oh yes it does ! More and more people grow food locally and people start to organize. I now buy only half of my groceries in the stores and it's only warming up (pun intended).
ps: we have friendly neighbours that are also friends, work in the cultural domain, can enjoy a nice bike or horse ride and even have top notch internet via optic fibers for cheap.