Comment on (serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting.

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Tiresia@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

The late 19th century USAmerican colonization of Native American land shows that you don’t need cars to make an industrial rural society. Trains will work just fine. This means you build towns to be walkable and centered around a train station, with agriculture surrounding each town. Modern heavily mechanized agriculture might make population densities so low that even this is not viable, but the products still need to be transported, so you can have trains that stop at each megafarm which can also carry passengers if necessary. When I was in Queensland a few years ago, I saw mechanized agriculture use a bespoke railway network to supply a factory, so clearly even now despite all the fossil fuel and car subsidies it’s economically viable.

Though as you may know, industrial agriculture is dumb and unsustainable. Desertification due to requiring too much water, climate change due to fertilizer consumption, industrial pollution that kills millions of people per year and destroys ecosystems, lack of genetic diversity causing crop blights that risk famines or global shortages, insecticides that cause cancer and destroy ecosystems, most of it being wasted on the meat industry and on maintaining massive surpluses and exports to ensure western global domination, etc.

If we want to do agriculture right, we want to do food forests. It’s more labor per calorie, but it’s resilient, local, and it doesn’t make the planet uninhabitable by the next century. Food forests are more compact too, which means that a rural population tending food forests can have a much higher population density, or can consist of large villages separated by rewilded natural landscape (and/or low density food forests for migratory communties). This makes trains even more convenient to get around because they can run more frequently.

Meanwhile if you want to live in the wilderness away from these towns, then an absence of car roads means you can live far away while only being a couple kilometers away. So you still don’t need a car because you can just hike along a trail to get to town in under an hour. Need to carry a lot of stuff? Use a Chinese wheelbarrow. Maybe a battery-powered one with stability and steering assistance if you don’t feel like getting exercise. They carry more than a modern American SUV and they don’t murder children either.

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