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>...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine! Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. Capitalism doesn't support

>...you're just not saving the planet. Which is fine! Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. Capitalism doesn't support long term health of the planet, so we must do it ourselves. Sustainability is beyond a hobby, it's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that rejects the norm of capitalism.

jopsen 6y ago
That's a very extreme position. I think consensus is that capitalism with carbon taxing is a step towards sustainability. A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. Edit: I do not assume the author advocates deindustrialization, presumably author just wanted to write a nice intro, to a fun hobby :)
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this?
  - eitland 6y ago
    >>A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. > Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463
- hosh 6y ago
  The author, like myself, and others who incorporate permaculture design principles, advocates for decentralizing our food system for resiliency, regenerative growth, stronger hyperlocal communities, development of a better sense of place, and a sense of purpose. There are a lot of angry young people in this generation who felt lied to about their job prospects, or careers. They were told the mark of an adult was someone who can move out of the parent’s basement abd support yourself. Yet unless you can get an entry level job at least $60k a year in the US, you are already swimming against the current. A college degree is no guarantee of success. That wealth gap is growing, and the pandemic made the reality stark. The recession is effectively over for people with high income, but for those without, it continued to be a huge struggle. So some get bitter. Some get political, or even radicalized. Some want things to go back to how things used to be — in the 90s even. Others are now seeking solutions with universal basic income. The thing with permaculture design and its decentralized food system is that it can address some of that wealth inequality. If the methods were expanded to cover the remaining basic needs at the foundational layer of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, then that would work a lot better than universal basic income. But one of the greatest characteristics of permaculture design is that it is decentralized. It does not require collective action. It can be framed as a hobby to get started. People who are implementing this doesn’t require that you change your views or beliefs, or that you get on board.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    >There are a lot of angry young people in this generation who felt lied to about their job prospects, or careers. They were told the mark of an adult was someone who can move out of the parent’s basement abd support yourself. Yet unless you can get an entry level job at least $60k a year in the US, you are already swimming against the current. A college degree is no guarantee of success. I understand this anger, and I have 3 young people as my own kids who feel this to varying degrees. But ... Until about a year ago, the median household income in the USA was about $56k/yr. That means that a substantial chunk of the country has "moved out the parent's basement and supports themselves" on less than $60k/yr. The problem as I see it is that the basics of "moving out of the basement" got confused with "being able to live in the most expensive real estate markets in the world", presumably because they also just happen to be really cool places to live and have lots of economic opportunity. The conflation of these two is therefore understandable, and is a reflection of our failure as a nation and as a society to ensure the economic opportunity and high quality of living are widely distributed (in terms of both demographics and geography). Our culture has also lied to our young people about what life for most people looks like. Movies, shows, social media filled with impressions not just edited but only representative (!) of the lives of the most priviledged people in society. A massively expanded set of components of the concept of what "middle class" means. The basics remain however: if you're just starting out in your working career, then the most expensive real estate in the US is off-limits to you unless you've gone into a line of work with outsize income. That still leaves most of the country available and very-to-somewhat affordable, albeit with reduced opportunities for satisfying or very renumerative work. But also much better chances of a much larger garden in which to try out permaculture !
  - jopsen 6y ago
    Are you suggesting that people growing food for themselves could somehow serve the same function as basic income? Will we need carbon taxes for that? Because, we have labour intensive crops rotting in the fields, when prices are low, because harvesting costs too much (when prices on strawberries is low; or migrant workers aren't available). I'd like to see math where growing your own crops out performs a job at seven eleven. Note. I think it can be a great stress relief and a great hobby. But the economics of it, seems sketchy even if we had aggressive carbon taxing (you can't build a garden without materials).
montenegrohugo 6y ago
> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. That's just plain wrong. Industrialization as it exists currently is bad because its optimizing for profit. If environmental costs were factored in (short and longterm), then we'd arrive at a sustainable balance. A carbon tax is a good first measure. If we were, as you suggest, to revert from industrialization back to artisanship and manual labor we would produce a fraction of what we do now. That's senseless. Would you wish for every household to have to produce their own food, raise and butcher and skin their own animals, hand-mine their stones and construct their homes, carve out their own furniture, sew their own clothes...? Our living standards would plummet. The fact is that industrialization multiplies efficiency. We can arrive at a post-scarcity society whilst also being long term sustainable, even with current global populations. It's just a matter of optimizing for it (and not just immediate profit).
- CommieDetector 6y ago
  Communist detected! Deploy starvation memes!
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >as you suggest FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad, and more people living a sustainable lifestyle will show that there's a way to survive without industrial capitalism. It's a baby step that shows people that it's possible. Not the end goal.
  - eitland 6y ago
    > FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad, Here is exactly what you wrote above: > Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. It is hard to interpret it in any way except that this is the outcome you wish for.
    - bluntfang 6y ago
      Then I resign that my communication failed. A baby step away from industrialization will allow people to connect with the world around them. So many people are disconnected from what non-processed food even looks, smells, or tastes like. Showing people that we don't have to eat the perfectly red, plump and tasteless tomato in exchange for a tasty, delicious, non-perfect tomato that they grew themselves helps show them that the world they've been conditioned to exist in isn't the only one available.
eptcyka 6y ago
>Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. I don't think that industrialization, the act of exploiting the scale of a demand for a specific item to produce it en masse is inherently unsustainable. In fact, I'd counter such an argument with the following hyperbole - every baby step away from industrialization is one more unfed baby. Efficient food production is what keeps a lot of people, of all sorts mind you, able to eat. Quite literally. Obviously, the food industry is notorious for it's wasteful practices, and that just means that there's room to grow. I sincerely wish you to read about the absurdities of food shortages in the USSR and re-evaluate your opinion on industrial food production. And speaking of sustainability, what does this term even mean in this context?
- simgooder 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's about moving away from industrialized food production as it's about bringing the power (and it's extremely powerful) of food production back to a local level for those who choose to participate.
cedex12 6y ago
> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. This seems to be at the core of many of my acquaintance's "principles", for lack of a better term. But it seems counter-intuitive to me: doesn't industrialization allow for: * better efficiency (larger scale) * higher technology, allowing more efficient techniques, again ? At some point, you can't have each of us working on a small 1-family farm if we still want to be able to have, e.g. computers, high quality medicine, travels, etc. Is "industrialization" the enemy here or is it growth and generalized overconsumption?
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >doesn't industrialization allow for... You tell me! How are we doing as an industrial society? From my perspective I see slavery and persecution of underprivileged people and pillaging of the Earth's natural resources in order to sustain an upper class lifestyle for a small percentage of the total population. And trust me, I am very comfortable due to industrialization, but I also know that it's because we make a lot of other people uncomfortable.
  - cedex12 6y ago
    > in order to sustain an upper class lifestyle for a small percentage of the total population. But this seems to agree with industrialization itself not being the problem, but the way we make use of the "industrially produced" resources we have, no?
  - vimy 6y ago
    > You tell me! How are we doing as an industrial society? Pretty great. Before the industrial revolution the number of people with a comfortable life was a tiny % of the world population. Now, half of the world is middle class or wealthier[1], living a more comfortable life than the kings of the past. Industrialization has been a blessing for humanity. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27/a-global-tipping-point-half-the-world-is-now-middle-class-or-wealthier/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
nzmsv 6y ago
Deindustrialization is a step towards sustainability, but not for the obvious reasons. It would drastically reduce the size of the worldwide human population through childhood deaths, disease, and shorter lifespans due to accidents. While that may be better for the planet, it would be a very hard sell for most people. Our natural instinct is to optimize for the opposite. It's not like our industrial society was created by aliens.
- hosh 6y ago
  The development of industrialization and being treated as a cog in a machine isn’t our natural instinct. The ideas of averages and seeing workers as another part of a machine came from people who were paid by factory owners to come up with better ways to control and maximize outputs. After a generation or two, kids grow up thinking that’s the way it is supposed to be. A lot of what we got used to with industrialization and feel we cannot live without comes from conditioning and a failure to mindfully examine the lens in which we view the world.
  - 0-O-0 6y ago
    What is this lost paradise taken away from us by industrialisation? Subsistence farming? You don't have to theorise if that was enjoyable lifestyle - just take a look on any developing nation and people that are more than eager to ditch that. Or do you propose we escape further back and live our lives as hunter-gatherers?
    - hosh 6y ago
      That is a really common response I get. I’m not coming from the frame that the past is better than the present, or that the past was somehow a paradise. I am also not coming from the frame that the present is better than the past, or that the future is better than the present, or that just because we got to industrialization, that it is necessarily the best we can do. I am talking about a different way of seeing and relating to the world that is not the same as way of seeing of the world that lead us to our current industrialization. That, while this frame does share some of the way of seeing from the past, it does not mean that it is the same. That this way of seeing considers people as whole beings, and ecologies that are not separate from people. That humans have a particular role in ecologies that includes their ability to reason, develop technologies, and cultivate the land. The kind of seeing that lead us to industrialization have been extent since the rise of civilizations and the separation of labor. I know a lot of people from developing nations seek out to become more like the modern world. I also see people from the modern world having lost some part of themselves, who they are, their sense of place and belonging, and desperately seek out remedies for it. I see people joke about “First World Problems”, but for me, those are symptoms of a much deeper psychological malaise. So they seek out the jungles of Peru for psychedelics. Go to India to find a guru. Search for social justice at home. Cling to traditional values as they watch the rest of the world erode. Or just resign to the grind and hope you are lucky enough to win the social lottery. I’m looking at a way of seeing that is not what had come before. It is not an escape. It taps into the tremendous power of human creativity, but one self-directed in a way that makes meaningful contributions to the world and society. I think that includes growing at least some of the food yourself, as that changes the participant’s psychology and relationship with the world and people around them, as well as building a decentralized food system. Not everyone is going to do that full time. But not everyone who can contribute something meaningful (art, music, etc) are able to do so now with the current systems in place.

jopsen 6y ago

That's a very extreme position. I think consensus is that capitalism with carbon taxing is a step towards sustainability. A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. Edit: I do not assume the author advocates deindustrialization, presumably author just wanted to write a nice intro, to a fun hobby :)

bluntfang 6y ago
>A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this?
- eitland 6y ago
  >>A call for deindustrialization is so far fetched it's pointless. > Can you show me who in this thread is calling for this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697463
hosh 6y ago
The author, like myself, and others who incorporate permaculture design principles, advocates for decentralizing our food system for resiliency, regenerative growth, stronger hyperlocal communities, development of a better sense of place, and a sense of purpose. There are a lot of angry young people in this generation who felt lied to about their job prospects, or careers. They were told the mark of an adult was someone who can move out of the parent’s basement abd support yourself. Yet unless you can get an entry level job at least $60k a year in the US, you are already swimming against the current. A college degree is no guarantee of success. That wealth gap is growing, and the pandemic made the reality stark. The recession is effectively over for people with high income, but for those without, it continued to be a huge struggle. So some get bitter. Some get political, or even radicalized. Some want things to go back to how things used to be — in the 90s even. Others are now seeking solutions with universal basic income. The thing with permaculture design and its decentralized food system is that it can address some of that wealth inequality. If the methods were expanded to cover the remaining basic needs at the foundational layer of Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, then that would work a lot better than universal basic income. But one of the greatest characteristics of permaculture design is that it is decentralized. It does not require collective action. It can be framed as a hobby to get started. People who are implementing this doesn’t require that you change your views or beliefs, or that you get on board.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  >There are a lot of angry young people in this generation who felt lied to about their job prospects, or careers. They were told the mark of an adult was someone who can move out of the parent’s basement abd support yourself. Yet unless you can get an entry level job at least $60k a year in the US, you are already swimming against the current. A college degree is no guarantee of success. I understand this anger, and I have 3 young people as my own kids who feel this to varying degrees. But ... Until about a year ago, the median household income in the USA was about $56k/yr. That means that a substantial chunk of the country has "moved out the parent's basement and supports themselves" on less than $60k/yr. The problem as I see it is that the basics of "moving out of the basement" got confused with "being able to live in the most expensive real estate markets in the world", presumably because they also just happen to be really cool places to live and have lots of economic opportunity. The conflation of these two is therefore understandable, and is a reflection of our failure as a nation and as a society to ensure the economic opportunity and high quality of living are widely distributed (in terms of both demographics and geography). Our culture has also lied to our young people about what life for most people looks like. Movies, shows, social media filled with impressions not just edited but only representative (!) of the lives of the most priviledged people in society. A massively expanded set of components of the concept of what "middle class" means. The basics remain however: if you're just starting out in your working career, then the most expensive real estate in the US is off-limits to you unless you've gone into a line of work with outsize income. That still leaves most of the country available and very-to-somewhat affordable, albeit with reduced opportunities for satisfying or very renumerative work. But also much better chances of a much larger garden in which to try out permaculture !
- jopsen 6y ago
  Are you suggesting that people growing food for themselves could somehow serve the same function as basic income? Will we need carbon taxes for that? Because, we have labour intensive crops rotting in the fields, when prices are low, because harvesting costs too much (when prices on strawberries is low; or migrant workers aren't available). I'd like to see math where growing your own crops out performs a job at seven eleven. Note. I think it can be a great stress relief and a great hobby. But the economics of it, seems sketchy even if we had aggressive carbon taxing (you can't build a garden without materials).

montenegrohugo 6y ago

> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. That's just plain wrong. Industrialization as it exists currently is bad because its optimizing for profit. If environmental costs were factored in (short and longterm), then we'd arrive at a sustainable balance. A carbon tax is a good first measure. If we were, as you suggest, to revert from industrialization back to artisanship and manual labor we would produce a fraction of what we do now. That's senseless. Would you wish for every household to have to produce their own food, raise and butcher and skin their own animals, hand-mine their stones and construct their homes, carve out their own furniture, sew their own clothes...? Our living standards would plummet. The fact is that industrialization multiplies efficiency. We can arrive at a post-scarcity society whilst also being long term sustainable, even with current global populations. It's just a matter of optimizing for it (and not just immediate profit).

CommieDetector 6y ago
Communist detected! Deploy starvation memes!
bluntfang 6y ago
>as you suggest FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad, and more people living a sustainable lifestyle will show that there's a way to survive without industrial capitalism. It's a baby step that shows people that it's possible. Not the end goal.
- eitland 6y ago
  > FYI, if I suggested anything at all it was that industrialization under capitalism is bad, Here is exactly what you wrote above: > Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. It is hard to interpret it in any way except that this is the outcome you wish for.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    Then I resign that my communication failed. A baby step away from industrialization will allow people to connect with the world around them. So many people are disconnected from what non-processed food even looks, smells, or tastes like. Showing people that we don't have to eat the perfectly red, plump and tasteless tomato in exchange for a tasty, delicious, non-perfect tomato that they grew themselves helps show them that the world they've been conditioned to exist in isn't the only one available.

eptcyka 6y ago

>Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. I don't think that industrialization, the act of exploiting the scale of a demand for a specific item to produce it en masse is inherently unsustainable. In fact, I'd counter such an argument with the following hyperbole - every baby step away from industrialization is one more unfed baby. Efficient food production is what keeps a lot of people, of all sorts mind you, able to eat. Quite literally. Obviously, the food industry is notorious for it's wasteful practices, and that just means that there's room to grow. I sincerely wish you to read about the absurdities of food shortages in the USSR and re-evaluate your opinion on industrial food production. And speaking of sustainability, what does this term even mean in this context?

simgooder 6y ago
I'm not sure it's about moving away from industrialized food production as it's about bringing the power (and it's extremely powerful) of food production back to a local level for those who choose to participate.

cedex12 6y ago

> Every baby step away from industrialization is a step towards sustainability. This seems to be at the core of many of my acquaintance's "principles", for lack of a better term. But it seems counter-intuitive to me: doesn't industrialization allow for: * better efficiency (larger scale) * higher technology, allowing more efficient techniques, again ? At some point, you can't have each of us working on a small 1-family farm if we still want to be able to have, e.g. computers, high quality medicine, travels, etc. Is "industrialization" the enemy here or is it growth and generalized overconsumption?

bluntfang 6y ago
>doesn't industrialization allow for... You tell me! How are we doing as an industrial society? From my perspective I see slavery and persecution of underprivileged people and pillaging of the Earth's natural resources in order to sustain an upper class lifestyle for a small percentage of the total population. And trust me, I am very comfortable due to industrialization, but I also know that it's because we make a lot of other people uncomfortable.
- cedex12 6y ago
  > in order to sustain an upper class lifestyle for a small percentage of the total population. But this seems to agree with industrialization itself not being the problem, but the way we make use of the "industrially produced" resources we have, no?
- vimy 6y ago
  > You tell me! How are we doing as an industrial society? Pretty great. Before the industrial revolution the number of people with a comfortable life was a tiny % of the world population. Now, half of the world is middle class or wealthier[1], living a more comfortable life than the kings of the past. Industrialization has been a blessing for humanity. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27/a-global-tipping-point-half-the-world-is-now-middle-class-or-wealthier/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...

nzmsv 6y ago

Deindustrialization is a step towards sustainability, but not for the obvious reasons. It would drastically reduce the size of the worldwide human population through childhood deaths, disease, and shorter lifespans due to accidents. While that may be better for the planet, it would be a very hard sell for most people. Our natural instinct is to optimize for the opposite. It's not like our industrial society was created by aliens.

hosh 6y ago
The development of industrialization and being treated as a cog in a machine isn’t our natural instinct. The ideas of averages and seeing workers as another part of a machine came from people who were paid by factory owners to come up with better ways to control and maximize outputs. After a generation or two, kids grow up thinking that’s the way it is supposed to be. A lot of what we got used to with industrialization and feel we cannot live without comes from conditioning and a failure to mindfully examine the lens in which we view the world.
- 0-O-0 6y ago
  What is this lost paradise taken away from us by industrialisation? Subsistence farming? You don't have to theorise if that was enjoyable lifestyle - just take a look on any developing nation and people that are more than eager to ditch that. Or do you propose we escape further back and live our lives as hunter-gatherers?
  - hosh 6y ago
    That is a really common response I get. I’m not coming from the frame that the past is better than the present, or that the past was somehow a paradise. I am also not coming from the frame that the present is better than the past, or that the future is better than the present, or that just because we got to industrialization, that it is necessarily the best we can do. I am talking about a different way of seeing and relating to the world that is not the same as way of seeing of the world that lead us to our current industrialization. That, while this frame does share some of the way of seeing from the past, it does not mean that it is the same. That this way of seeing considers people as whole beings, and ecologies that are not separate from people. That humans have a particular role in ecologies that includes their ability to reason, develop technologies, and cultivate the land. The kind of seeing that lead us to industrialization have been extent since the rise of civilizations and the separation of labor. I know a lot of people from developing nations seek out to become more like the modern world. I also see people from the modern world having lost some part of themselves, who they are, their sense of place and belonging, and desperately seek out remedies for it. I see people joke about “First World Problems”, but for me, those are symptoms of a much deeper psychological malaise. So they seek out the jungles of Peru for psychedelics. Go to India to find a guru. Search for social justice at home. Cling to traditional values as they watch the rest of the world erode. Or just resign to the grind and hope you are lucky enough to win the social lottery. I’m looking at a way of seeing that is not what had come before. It is not an escape. It taps into the tremendous power of human creativity, but one self-directed in a way that makes meaningful contributions to the world and society. I think that includes growing at least some of the food yourself, as that changes the participant’s psychology and relationship with the world and people around them, as well as building a decentralized food system. Not everyone is going to do that full time. But not everyone who can contribute something meaningful (art, music, etc) are able to do so now with the current systems in place.