this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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If you look at land use maps, you will see that the urban areas are so small compared to the agricultural and livestock area needed to support the population. This is the biggest cause of deforestation, and population density actually makes it much worse, because it centralizes consumption and requires more logistic costs to deliver the needed food, with much higher rates of wastes. If we lived in less dense areas, perhaps we could do with local, smaller-scale agriculture instead.
Do you have anything you can cite for that proposition? I fully acknowledge that there could be something I'm missing, but just thinking about it logically it doesn't make sense.
It takes X agriculture and Y livestock to feed a person for a year. Economy of scale would allow you to produce more with less in a larger centralized facility compared to many smaller farms. The implements required to support a large facility should be less than the sum of many smaller facilities that produce an equal output. The agriculture and livestock are brought to a central point (the city) as opposed to many decentralized towns.
Happy to be wrong, would just need to see the evidence, because right now my intuition is saying no. Love to see whatever you have!
There are a couple articles I can link when I get home. They studied a similar phenomenon in some Brazilian cities. There are several factors involved, including food losses due to distance to consumption and the fact that smaller producers tend to grow more diverse food.
And the fact that so much food is thrown out, because it spends 75% of it's expiration date traveling between facilities. That's why fresh food from big chains starts being bad way faster than local market bough.
Low density centralized urban areas require even more logistics, higher waste rates, higher utilities costs, and so on.
As an example: a 10 floor high rise with 40 apartments, can be wired for optic fiber in 1 day. There is no way to wire 40 standalone houses just as fast.
Your take on urban density is wayyyyy off base and wrong.
The deforestation being a result of agricultural expansion to support a growing population is spot on.
Urban density increases the efficiency of logistics, you state it makes it worse. The cost-per-unit goes down as density goes up. Economies of scale apply here, logistics almost always becomes cheaper per unit the more of it you do. This applies to farming, transportation, processing, packaging...etc
Logistics are something too complex. Your statement makes me think you're referring to a scenario with one source of a product and either one consumer area or several ones. In that cass, indeed, a more denser region would make it easier, but the scenario I described consists of production decentralized and closer to consumption, making logistics easier and cheaper, with fewer middlemen.
But maybe I didn't explain it all very well. I have a couple or articles bookmarked in my pc that I will link here when I have the chance.
I just hope my memory isn't playing tricks on me, because it so, it's gonna be really shameful lol.
The only reason we have huge farms is because of livestock, not population density. Large farms grow commodity crops, most of which go to feeding livestock, most of which are cows. Farms growing fruits and vegetables for human consumption don't require anywhere near the amount of land that commodity crops do. You can feed a surprisingly large number of people off of an acre of land if you take large livestock out of the equation.
Just sit and think about this for a second and you'll realize how incredibly stupid this statement is.