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> Why must everything always "scale" in order to be good?

Because there's eight billion of us. A lot of things work for one person but not for everybody. The big issues of land use, density, water, and transport end up forcing people into choice that perhaps nobody ultimately wants.

(this is not a reason for you or anybody else not to do it! But it's a reason against all sorts of "why doesn't everybody just X")

Yet we've seen how centralising everything has made our world a lot less resilient. Redundancies are good, at least to a certain degree. If more people had a small vegetable patch, we didn't need as many soil-destroying farming mega-corps, and would use less aggressive fertilisers and herbicides, for example.

>Yet we've seen how centralising everything has made our world a lot less resilient.

A lot less resilient compared to what?

Resilient to pests, environmental changes, etc?

Biodiversity is a very good mechanism for resilience. Even on a tiny scale: if this year one of my tomato varieties doesn't produce due to heat/cold/damp, some of the others will. And if all tomatoes fail, I have beans. Or salad. And potatoes, and turnips, and carrots.

Yet if all you have is one variety of potatoes, and it gets sick, it can upset an entire country, kill millions¹

You'd think the solution is obvious, but the opposite is happening. Especially the staple foods that are now feeding the billions, are rapidly dwindling in varieties. Some crops, like bananas and agave already down to effectively one genetic variety - if (when) that fails, we'll lose the ability to produce bananas or agave (tequila, etc) almost entirely. Imagine this happening to rice or grain or potatoes.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

Compared to a world before global economic trade relations, standardisation, and hyper-dependent supply chains.

A lot of the reasons why scaling is necessary come down to reducing marginal costs and maximising profitability. Those are different equations to sustainability.

For example, a big part of an industrial farm's "efficiency" is down to reduction of labour costs and optimisation of logistics, but the actual environmental resource usage does not scale along the same curve.

Worse even.

Many of that "efficiency" is achieved by externalizing costs.

The farm can (must?) produce cheaper (or have bigger margins), by polluting both its environment and the very resources it needs to run on in the long term. It "externalizes" costs to the community around it and to a future.

Pollution, depletion, animal abuse, reduced biodiversity, sped up resistance to antibiotics, etc etc.

This isn't by any means "sustainable" in the literal sense: that it can continue, let alone grow, like this. We're on borrowed time already. It's very clear that the current model also cannot sustain billions. So dismissing alternatives because they cannot sustain billions is a poor argument.

That's fine in and of itself, as a hobby. But it's not going to save the world, either, due to aformentioned inability to scale (most importantly, it would be impossible for the whole world to live like this: the world population is large enough that we rely on high-yield farming).

> That's fine in and of itself, as a hobby.

Is it? All my "hobby" needs, is to feed me and my household and some friends and they me. My "hobby" doesn't need to feed the entire world population.

All I want is for it to *reduce* the footprint of five, maybe ten people around me. It does that. And therefore is a net benefit. Ten people with less emissions, less pollution, less animal harm, and more fun. Even if only one in hundred thousand people does this, thats 700000 people with significantly reduced footprint.

I honestly have a problem with the absolutism in such discussions. Something doesn't have to "feed the entire world" in order to help us move forward.

To compare the 700000 figure: Tesla churns out 3 times that amount of cars in a year. If we presume these teslas are bought by people who want to reduce their footprint, and that the reduction of one bought tesla is close to my reduction (its not, its obviously much more complex) just being a bit more self-sustaining would be similar to a third of the win all of Tesla contributes.

And if we agree that "one tesla" equals "some reduction of footprint" (I don't agree, though), every tesla is a win. This isn't only valuable until every car is an EV. It's not absolutes.

>None of it scales. None of it is optimized. None of it has to. My time spent on these "chores" is free, because I recharge and enjoy that time.

80% of the resources you are buying to support your hobby farm are produced by people living in places where this makes no sense.

The fact that you're saying "I don't care if it scales" implies you're solving a problem for yourself, not the world.

> implies you're solving a problem for yourself, not the world.

But I don't have to solve the problem of feeding the entire world sustainably¹. I just have to make sure that my contribution to a more sustainable world is net positive. It is.

The same argument often comes up in "Being vegetarian": my personal choice won't solve animal welfare or carbon emissions of food production. But all the vegetarians in the world do make a large difference.

> 80% of the resources you are buying to support your hobby farm

That's a bold statement to make and one that I know, for a fact, to be untrue. I source most myself. You truly don't need that much to grow 20kg of apples or 10kg of tomatoes in a year. Nearly all of what it needs is provided by "nature" and my direct surroundings. From compost to seeds to sun, water and CO2. I really don't need that much to grow this. Same for keeping bees. Some wood for their hives - less wood per hive than the pallet used for shipping your honey from China into Europe. Some tools and some (reusable) packaging. But non of that compares to what's needed to get that plastic squeezy jar of honey into your cabinet. I'm certain my net emission is far less - per jar, per tomato, per apple than when I'd buy them in a supermarket.

¹ And that ignores the fact that the current model of food production also cannot feed the entire world population on generational timescale. So to argue that my "contribution" won't feed the world is a strange one.

>The same argument often comes up in "Being vegetarian": my personal choice won't solve animal welfare or carbon emissions of food production. But all the vegetarians in the world do make a large difference.

Here's how I think about it.

You reducing carbon emissions by reducing your agri footprint by going vegan is an improvement over the alternative even if I wouldn't. Everyone doing this is a major improvement over the alternative.

Me not using tarps, pesticides, not using synthetic fertilizers and caring about runoff, etc and being a backyard farmer rather than having a lawn in this endless suburb like i'm already doing is an improvement over the alternative. (even tho i need more time and land to cover most of my carbs and a bit more than some quail too)

But spreading out 8 billion people and making everyone backyard farmers is probably an ecological disaster.

If everyone just solved the problem for themselves there wouldn’t be any problem for the world.

The real problem is that a lot of people use everyone else as an excuse to do nothing, and then nothing gets done.