Comment by jeppester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeppester | Hacker News Reader

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It seems as though you are antagonizing a certain imaginary group of people that I do not belong to, just because I chose to live in the country side.

There was a reason I used the phrasing "green surroundings", I'm well aware that it's not "nature" in the sense of being untouched by humans. There are hardly any such places in Denmark.

Nevertheless people live here because they like these surroundings, it doesn't make any sense that they should "pay" for living here by having those surroundings taken away.

Whether or not it's feasible to have people living in the country side is a whole other discussion, which I do not think can be boiled down to city = good, countryside = bad.

Another related discussion is what is the natural habitat for a human being, at this point in time a slight majority of humans might live in larger cities, but that is historically a new development. I don't have the answer here, but my guess would be that a small town in the country side is more similar to the environments humans have historically lived and evolved in.

Thanks for your thorough response, I appreciate it.

My point was less that "everything comes from the city" but that living in the countryside has massive externalities that get deposited elsewhere as I mentioned.

So it would be kind of fair to at least start accepting some externalities - like energy - to be actually part of your living reality.

In essence: you need energy, get it yourself and don't NIMBY your way out of the consequences of "living in the countryside".

The fields that the solar farms are replacing were generating food for everyone, including those who live in the cities.

1-2 days per year the whole town has a smell of manure.

That's is an externality we accepted when we moved here, so we do not complain that the fields need to produce food.

Also, you are implying that we have not accepted any solar panels, which is wrong. We have plenty in the near area. We just don't want all the fields surrounding the town to be plastered with panels.

As I said below:

Cozy small time agriculture in the west is a small part of your general food supply. The rest is in places you do not want to live and is called monoculture. A huge part of your food supply is not produced "in the countryside" in either Denmark or most of the West.

It all starts with oil and energy. Nothing else matters as much. So getting off oil and producing energy in other ways is at the forefront of our struggle as a species and if you deny this progress because it hinders the view from your detached house porch I get the impression you have not really realized the situation we are in.

I totally agree, except for the last part where you attack a straw man.

I'm not talking about the view from my front porch, I'm talking about solar panels in nearly every direction, like a sort of barrier, choking the town.

As mentioned we do have solar panels in some directions, we just don't want them everywhere.

Also there's no dichotomy here, it's not a choice between choking small towns and saving the planet vs. the opposite.

I'm arguing that we should first and foremost place solar panels where people already do not want to live for various reasons. The incentives we've created so far have not been good at that.

Update: I realise that I misread the first part of your comment. The agriculture that the panels are replacing is probably what you would call monoculture. It would however seem that the monoculture you picture looks very different from what we have in Denmark. If you think about endless "field deserts" that's not what it is. That is also why people like to live here.

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